The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► Dan, I forget, how long has it been since you've been on the show? I can look it up.

00:00:03 ◼   ► Man, I don't even know. You could. What I know is that I think I either had an infant or no kid,

00:00:10 ◼   ► and now I have a four-and-a-half-year-old who does Legos in his sleep, basically.

00:00:15 ◼   ► The Lego budget has surpassed the food budget some weeks.

00:00:20 ◼   ► Oh, wow. Episode 288 in 2020? No. Is that right?

00:00:27 ◼   ► It might be. It might be.

00:00:28 ◼   ► Jesus Christ. That's terrible.

00:00:30 ◼   ► You know, I'm kind of off the Apple beat, although I'm still, obviously, reloading Daring Fireball.

00:00:35 ◼   ► It's embarrassing. Whenever I look at my Safari tabs that are open, 30% of them are gray.

00:00:41 ◼   ► That's very nice to hear. It's surprising how often that happens to me, too.

00:00:47 ◼   ► Do you find yourself opening a bunch of your own tabs a lot because you're, like, referencing previous work?

00:00:53 ◼   ► Totally, yeah. I have a rule now where, basically, at the end of the week, I just

00:00:57 ◼   ► close the browser window, and whatever's gone is gone.

00:01:01 ◼   ► Otherwise, there's just too many tabs.

00:01:04 ◼   ► I should do that. I think I'm up to 434 tabs in Safari right now.

00:01:08 ◼   ► And then I try to do it at the end of the month.

00:01:11 ◼   ► I do it as, like, a last day of the month thing, and I missed last month.

00:01:14 ◼   ► And now it's...

00:01:16 ◼   ► Now I'm halfway through November, so I'm like, well, I might as well wait till after Thanksgiving

00:01:20 ◼   ► and just clean up two months.

00:01:21 ◼   ► The point where you can no longer tell which tab is which piece and you have to hover, that's

00:01:26 ◼   ► to me when it's like, okay, this is no longer serving its purpose.

00:01:30 ◼   ► Yeah, absolutely.

00:01:31 ◼   ► Well, how's the new consumer doing?

00:01:34 ◼   ► Let's just get it instead of saving them for the end.

00:01:37 ◼   ► Yeah, so I'm almost seven years in to writing The New Consumer, which many of you, if you've

00:01:44 ◼   ► been listening to the talk show as long as I have, I used to be the tech correspondent at

00:01:50 ◼   ► Silicon Alley Insider starting in 2007, which became Business Insider.

00:01:55 ◼   ► And I was writing about Apple starting really full-time in 07.

00:02:00 ◼   ► And then I had a site called Splat F, which was kind of my Apple-focused site.

00:02:05 ◼   ► And then I went on to work at Quartz, and then I was the editor-in-chief of Recode.

00:02:08 ◼   ► And then I started The New Consumer in 2019.

00:02:12 ◼   ► And basically, it's my column, newsletter, whatever you want to call it, about the collision of

00:02:18 ◼   ► the tech world and the consumer world.

00:02:20 ◼   ► I've always been obsessed with consumer products and brands and e-commerce.

00:02:24 ◼   ► And the tech beat kind of got a little dull for me around the 2018-2019 time frame.

00:02:32 ◼   ► So I still write about Apple sometimes.

00:02:34 ◼   ► And I did a big piece on the Apple Watch earlier this year.

00:02:37 ◼   ► I realized I'd worn it every day for 10 years after it launched.

00:02:40 ◼   ► And a lot of my work now is doing consumer insights and research.

00:02:45 ◼   ► So I do surveys, and I try to understand, for example, the Apple Watch thing was half my

00:02:50 ◼   ► review, and then half a bunch of data I had from a consumer survey I did about how Apple

00:02:54 ◼   ► Watch users have literally changed their lives because of the watch.

00:02:58 ◼   ► And that tracked with my personal experience, too.

00:03:01 ◼   ► So newconsumer.com, if you want to check it out and join, we'd love to have you.

00:03:06 ◼   ► Seven years, though.

00:03:08 ◼   ► That's a good run.

00:03:09 ◼   ► It's funny listening to your highlights there, because we've been friends for a long time.

00:03:13 ◼   ► You've been on the show many times, although, as we just emphasize, not for a while.

00:03:17 ◼   ► But that's entirely my fault, not because you haven't been doing interesting things or didn't

00:03:22 ◼   ► have things that I should have solicited your input as a guest on the show for.

00:03:27 ◼   ► But it sounds to me like you found your home, writing for yourself.

00:03:33 ◼   ► I hope so.

00:03:34 ◼   ► We've talked about this many times over the years, and Splat F was kind of my first attempt

00:03:38 ◼   ► at the Gruber lifestyle solo publishing thing.

00:03:42 ◼   ► It turned out banner ads, not a great business model for solo publishers.

00:03:46 ◼   ► Subscriptions work so much better.

00:03:48 ◼   ► And obviously, much credit to Ben Thompson, the kind of newsletter godfather for building

00:03:54 ◼   ► that business model out, at least in the tech media community.

00:03:58 ◼   ► And a number of people have been really successful with that, many of them much more successful

00:04:03 ◼   ► than I have.

00:04:04 ◼   ► But it's sustainable.

00:04:05 ◼   ► It's still a job.

00:04:06 ◼   ► And you've got to do it every day.

00:04:08 ◼   ► It's an amazing thing that you can make a real living online by working for yourself and writing

00:04:14 ◼   ► to people who value your work enough to pay for it.

00:04:17 ◼   ► And I love it.

00:04:18 ◼   ► And it really lets me chase kind of most of the work I do is for them, obviously.

00:04:22 ◼   ► But some of it's for me, too.

00:04:23 ◼   ► So I get to go to a sake brewery in Japan and someday write about that or go deep on textiles

00:04:30 ◼   ► with some French industrial designers and things like that.

00:04:33 ◼   ► Every once in a while, I've got to keep the balance.

00:04:36 ◼   ► Most of it is the business of consumer products and e-commerce.

00:04:39 ◼   ► But it's been awesome.

00:04:41 ◼   ► I'm really lucky to be able to do it.

00:04:43 ◼   ► I do think that Ben deserves credit for...

00:04:48 ◼   ► And again, I'm not just trying to be self-effacing here.

00:04:51 ◼   ► And people come on and credit me for blazing certain trails for indie publishing.

00:04:58 ◼   ► And I've been doing what I do longer than a lot of people at this point.

00:05:03 ◼   ► But I think the newsletter model has...

00:05:09 ◼   ► It's almost beyond dispute now.

00:05:13 ◼   ► Me presenting it here as, hey, maybe this newsletter thing works for independent publishers is sort of...

00:05:19 ◼   ► It's almost silly to put it that way.

00:05:21 ◼   ► I think it's proven to be a sustainable model for so many people in a way that my style of sponsorships really isn't.

00:05:32 ◼   ► I mean, and there are some sites that are more like Daring Fireball.

00:05:36 ◼   ► And Daring Fireball is now an outlier, a real outlier in not having any sort of paid membership.

00:05:43 ◼   ► Even though I had a membership 20 years ago.

00:05:47 ◼   ► And I might, I probably should.

00:05:48 ◼   ► If I were smart, I would bring it back.

00:05:50 ◼   ► I mean, if I were really smart and had any business sense, I would have brought it back years ago.

00:05:55 ◼   ► But it's because I don't prioritize making more money over writing what I want to write.

00:06:03 ◼   ► And so it's, this just keeps getting kicked down the road.

00:06:06 ◼   ► But it's clearly more sustainable.

00:06:09 ◼   ► And that's, people credit Substack with that.

00:06:12 ◼   ► And it's, obviously, that's a part of it.

00:06:14 ◼   ► But I, you, I'm sure you read my, I don't know.

00:06:19 ◼   ► I feel queasy about Substack's role in this.

00:06:23 ◼   ► And you don't use Substack.

00:06:24 ◼   ► Well, so I actually.

00:06:25 ◼   ► Or do you?

00:06:26 ◼   ► I don't.

00:06:28 ◼   ► Well, I do and I don't.

00:06:29 ◼   ► I started mirroring on Substack as an experiment earlier this year.

00:06:33 ◼   ► And the reason I don't use Substack, and I have never used it as my main thing and never will,

00:06:39 ◼   ► is that they do a lot of things with the user experience that I would never accept on my own site.

00:06:44 ◼   ► Many of the things that you raised as issues.

00:06:46 ◼   ► The whole, the takeover.

00:06:48 ◼   ► The way it makes you think that you have to subscribe to read a post, which you don't.

00:06:54 ◼   ► But they hide the button.

00:06:55 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:06:56 ◼   ► Turns out, though, that works.

00:06:59 ◼   ► And people don't really care that much.

00:07:01 ◼   ► So I did set up a mirror on Substack in, I think, in March or February.

00:07:07 ◼   ► And it has grown my free subscribership there much faster than on my owned and operated site,

00:07:15 ◼   ► which is WordPress and memberful and very minimalist.

00:07:19 ◼   ► I should actually be a little more upfront about getting people to subscribe, even to the free list.

00:07:25 ◼   ► But Substack really kind of smashes you over the head with it, and then they redirect you to their app and all this stuff.

00:07:30 ◼   ► So I'm treating it almost more like a Twitter where some of my stuff, most of my stuff goes up there.

00:07:37 ◼   ► People can pay me to read there.

00:07:39 ◼   ► There's not a lot of paid membership activity there.

00:07:41 ◼   ► It's much stronger on my owned and operated site, which, great.

00:07:44 ◼   ► Like, I'd rather have those paid customers there.

00:07:47 ◼   ► And I might just switch it to free only on Substack and really just harvest emails there.

00:07:52 ◼   ► And, you know, that's never going to be my highest value customer.

00:07:55 ◼   ► But it is interesting to see it be more of like a social network than a publishing tool.

00:08:01 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:08:02 ◼   ► And I wouldn't, I honestly, even as your friend, even if we weren't on the air recording this, I would tell you, oh, that sounds fine.

00:08:08 ◼   ► I really would.

00:08:09 ◼   ► That sounds fine to me.

00:08:10 ◼   ► To treat it like Twitter, right?

00:08:11 ◼   ► And I've, it's actually very high on my list of things to do in the coming weeks is to get the Daring Fireball Blue Sky account actually posting automatically.

00:08:21 ◼   ► I've had Mastodon and it used to, and I still do miss it.

00:08:25 ◼   ► I was just listening to the ATP when Marco Arment was talking about starting a Reddit board or channel, whatever they call the subreddit.

00:08:35 ◼   ► Subreddit for Overcast and talking about how Twitter used to be that thing.

00:08:42 ◼   ► Like it was the one place where users of Overcast knew that they could talk about Overcast at a place where Marco would see what they were saying about Overcast and he could chime in if he wanted to.

00:08:57 ◼   ► And it definitely, the peak decade-ish of Twitter was the closest to having a centralized community for my stuff that I ever had.

00:09:08 ◼   ► And it is what it is in the last few years under Elon and turning it into X.

00:09:17 ◼   ► But even if you put your political feelings, the, hey, don't go there, it's a Nazi bar, whatever, which is all valid.

00:09:25 ◼   ► I don't want to dismiss it with whatever.

00:09:26 ◼   ► But I'm saying even if you set that aside, it just doesn't have that central role that Twitter used to have.

00:09:33 ◼   ► Even if you put aside, which is a big thing to put aside for a lot of people.

00:09:37 ◼   ► And it's not just that people left, it's just the way it works now, right?

00:09:43 ◼   ► The de-emphasis on URLs, which I think is ridiculous, the way that now people want to...

00:09:49 ◼   ► Oh, I think they reversed that.

00:09:50 ◼   ► I know.

00:09:50 ◼   ► I heard that they did because they have the new product guy.

00:09:53 ◼   ► The new browser, yeah.

00:09:54 ◼   ► But it's still, it's all, I don't know, it's just not what it used to be.

00:09:58 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, it can still be a phenomenally entertaining place to waste an hour of your life.

00:10:03 ◼   ► But it's not the hub the way that it was.

00:10:06 ◼   ► And that's why these days, for me, when I post links, I make money.

00:10:11 ◼   ► So I have to post links on Twitter, on threads, on LinkedIn.

00:10:14 ◼   ► And Substack now has, there are very few places where people actually want to go read these days.

00:10:20 ◼   ► So I don't see Substack as my friend.

00:10:24 ◼   ► And I see Substack as someone who will eventually compete with me for my business and my readership.

00:10:30 ◼   ► But in this, if I can harvest a few more thousand subscribers that drive my sponsorship rate up,

00:10:36 ◼   ► and even if those people disappear in a few years, for now that works.

00:10:40 ◼   ► So that's what I've been testing.

00:10:42 ◼   ► We'll see.

00:10:42 ◼   ► Yeah, treating Substack as another outlet for having a sort of sub-community and seeing how it goes,

00:10:49 ◼   ► which I think is perfectly valid, and I can see it when I do dip my toes in there.

00:10:54 ◼   ► And I can see that some of the publications I subscribe to there have pretty good interactions

00:10:59 ◼   ► with Substack, not as a newsletter slash blogging CMS, but as a social network.

00:11:07 ◼   ► And there is like a whole Twitter-like component to it now.

00:11:10 ◼   ► And it's nice to boil my criticism or even my warning to would-be independent publications or solo operations,

00:11:20 ◼   ► whether it's a team thing or a solo thing, that relies on Substack is not to view them as being entirely on Substack

00:11:32 ◼   ► and entirely dependent on Substack equaling independence.

00:11:36 ◼   ► That's the thing that I think is like a red flag.

00:11:39 ◼   ► No, you are not independent.

00:11:41 ◼   ► And if nothing changes and they don't tighten any screws or change anything from now until the end of time,

00:11:48 ◼   ► well, then my warning will have been for not, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a valid warning.

00:11:54 ◼   ► It's like you can drive around in your car without wearing a seatbelt for 40 years,

00:11:58 ◼   ► and if you're never in an accident, good for you, right?

00:12:01 ◼   ► But that doesn't mean you shouldn't have been wearing a seatbelt for all those years.

00:12:06 ◼   ► I completely agree.

00:12:07 ◼   ► And what you said, like, don't call it your Substack.

00:12:09 ◼   ► I think that is, like, every time people do that, it drives me nuts.

00:12:12 ◼   ► This is your life we're talking about.

00:12:14 ◼   ► Don't give that brand equal footing with you.

00:12:16 ◼   ► Right.

00:12:17 ◼   ► I've actually set mine up as a subdomain on my main domain.

00:12:21 ◼   ► So if I shut it down, I'll just redirect all that traffic because I still own the traffic through the subdomain.

00:12:28 ◼   ► Yeah, you're totally right, and I don't see them as someone to trust or rely on, and I don't see them as being in good taste.

00:12:36 ◼   ► But, you know, the readers are really there.

00:12:39 ◼   ► Yeah, I hear that, too.

00:12:42 ◼   ► It's hard to argue with that.

00:12:42 ◼   ► Right.

00:12:43 ◼   ► And whenever I write about it, I hear from people who say, and often because they read my site, they're like,

00:12:49 ◼   ► I hear you, and I agree with you about this, that, and the other thing, but they really do drive traffic, or they really did help me build.

00:12:55 ◼   ► Some people who aren't, they're like, I'm not even doing this as a business.

00:12:59 ◼   ► It's important to me, and I want to build a readership, but I'm not trying to make this my career.

00:13:06 ◼   ► It's a side thing.

00:13:07 ◼   ► And I didn't even put any effort into this, and Substack helped me build a couple of hundred or low thousands subscription list.

00:13:16 ◼   ► And that's great.

00:13:18 ◼   ► It really is.

00:13:19 ◼   ► And I know that that works, right?

00:13:21 ◼   ► But somebody who sees it as a side hustle is a very different thing than the people who are building ostensibly independent publications.

00:13:28 ◼   ► Right.

00:13:29 ◼   ► Yeah, the interesting thing these days is that now that so much as podcasts become video, and as Instagram becomes more video,

00:13:37 ◼   ► and your kind of followers, customers, whatever you want to call them, are now bouncing around between five different platforms to kind of stay in touch with what you're doing,

00:13:49 ◼   ► it almost becomes that the human-to-human connection is what's most important.

00:13:54 ◼   ► So people will, I think, follow you.

00:13:56 ◼   ► Obviously, there'll be some drop-off.

00:13:57 ◼   ► But if you are launching a new YouTube show or a new Instagram Reels thing or whatever it is,

00:14:05 ◼   ► the people who care will kind of do the work to find you on those platforms in a way that I think maybe was a little hard to ask people to do in the past.

00:14:16 ◼   ► But really, it all just ends up being either people like you and they want to follow your work no matter where you are, or they don't.

00:14:23 ◼   ► And the stronger businesses are going to be obviously the ones where there's a real affinity between the person and the customer.

00:14:31 ◼   ► So that's the goal is just to be indispensable and then try to own as much of it as you can, I think.

00:14:39 ◼   ► Yeah, I would say so.

00:14:41 ◼   ► And I think you're doing a good job, and I'm very, very happy for your success.

00:14:44 ◼   ► Thank you.

00:14:45 ◼   ► You finally found a job you can hold on to.

00:14:47 ◼   ► I know.

00:14:48 ◼   ► It is the longest job I've ever had.

00:14:51 ◼   ► Not because I was in my 20s, so four years was a lot of time back then.

00:14:56 ◼   ► I remember when Daring Fireball became the longest job I ever had, which didn't take long.

00:15:02 ◼   ► I don't think I had ever held any job in my life for more than two years, maybe a little more than two years.

00:15:13 ◼   ► And when I was more of like a freelancer, I had relationships with clients or whatever you want to call it that lasted more like five years or more, some design work.

00:15:25 ◼   ► But that's not the same thing as having a job.

00:15:27 ◼   ► Totally, yeah.

00:15:28 ◼   ► I'd never really supported myself with one main job that I could put on my tax return for more than two years.

00:15:34 ◼   ► And it wasn't Daring Fireball.

00:15:37 ◼   ► I started writing it in 2002, and I think I went full-time.

00:15:40 ◼   ► You'd think I'd know this.

00:15:42 ◼   ► I think it was 2006, or was it 2007?

00:15:45 ◼   ► That feels right.

00:15:45 ◼   ► I think I remember that.

00:15:47 ◼   ► So I don't know.

00:15:48 ◼   ► Sometime around 2009, 2010 was when it really hit me.

00:15:53 ◼   ► Like, hey, I've been doing this full-time longer than any other job, and it feels like it's doing better than ever.

00:16:00 ◼   ► Like, the numbers are going up, and my enthusiasm for it remains as strong as ever.

00:16:06 ◼   ► Holy shit, I think this is it.

00:16:09 ◼   ► And I finally found a job that I can't get fired from.

00:16:13 ◼   ► I think it's cool to spin up other things like Dithering.

00:16:17 ◼   ► I think that's another thing now, where if you work for a company, they're not going to let you do that.

00:16:22 ◼   ► Right.

00:16:22 ◼   ► Right.

00:16:23 ◼   ► No, it's very interesting that I never had to think about asking permission to do Dithering.

00:16:29 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:16:29 ◼   ► Or when I did Vesper for a couple years, it was very interesting.

00:16:33 ◼   ► I mean, I guess I sort of have to ask permission from my wife, like for Vesper in particular, because that took a lot of time away.

00:16:42 ◼   ► Dithering, I guess I didn't even ask, because it's sort of like, okay, let's hit record, stop.

00:16:48 ◼   ► And the research is just what I'm already doing, whereas Vesper really did.

00:16:52 ◼   ► And the constraint of the time limit is brilliant.

00:16:55 ◼   ► Right.

00:16:56 ◼   ► No, it really is.

00:16:57 ◼   ► I was just saying on Dithering this week that it would be if I weren't, no offense to people who are listening to this show, which I think I would enjoy too.

00:17:07 ◼   ► But I think that if there were two of me, one who does this stuff and one who does something else, like works at Apple or something and therefore can't be a public figure, but listens to podcasts, I think Dithering would be my favorite podcast.

00:17:23 ◼   ► I would enjoy the topics, I think I would enjoy listening to me and Ben, but I would very much enjoy the 15-minute, twice-a-week format.

00:17:32 ◼   ► It's funny, because I'm definitely a three-hour podcast listener, but as a host, I would definitely lean towards something, an artificially short time constraint, too.

00:17:45 ◼   ► But you're like me, you don't have a commute, and ATP is a two-plus-hour, once-a-week, literally like clockwork, 52 weeks a year.

00:17:56 ◼   ► Every year for all these years, they've never not had an episode, which to me is crazy.

00:18:02 ◼   ► But now that they've made it a thing, they feel like they can't break it, which is nuts to me, as somebody who publishes so irregularly.

00:18:09 ◼   ► But I don't have room in my life.

00:18:12 ◼   ► Literally, I just don't have time for that many more long podcasts.

00:18:15 ◼   ► I mean, I'd have to actually take time away from doing actual work to listen to them, and I cannot.

00:18:21 ◼   ► I know some people do.

00:18:22 ◼   ► But I absolutely, I don't even listen to music when I work.

00:18:26 ◼   ► But I could never listen to a podcast while I work, because I'd either completely miss every single thing they're saying, or it would capture my attention, and my fingers would stop moving on the keyboard, and I would just sit there and listen.

00:18:38 ◼   ► It would be one or the other.

00:18:40 ◼   ► Yeah, I tried listening to podcasts while doing, also trying to read emails or a book or anything.

00:18:47 ◼   ► It's just, it's not, it's not going to happen.

00:18:48 ◼   ► But yeah.

00:18:49 ◼   ► Brent Simmons listens to podcasts while he works.

00:18:51 ◼   ► I have no idea how he does it.

00:18:53 ◼   ► He's sitting there writing programming code, listening to podcasts.

00:18:56 ◼   ► That's amazing.

00:18:57 ◼   ► It blows my mind.

00:18:58 ◼   ► That's a real talent.

00:18:58 ◼   ► It's unbelievable.

00:19:00 ◼   ► Different strokes for different folks.

00:19:02 ◼   ► All right.

00:19:04 ◼   ► But speaking of sponsorships, let me take a break and thank our first sponsor of the episode, our good friends at Notion.

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00:21:18 ◼   ► Notion.com slash talkshow.

00:21:22 ◼   ► We do have a bunch of little things to talk about.

00:21:25 ◼   ► Did you get your iPhone pocket?

00:21:27 ◼   ► I did not.

00:21:28 ◼   ► Ben did, though.

00:21:29 ◼   ► Ben ordered one for his wife.

00:21:31 ◼   ► That was quite the story this week.

00:21:33 ◼   ► And kind of a perfect new consumer topic, too, right?

00:21:37 ◼   ► A little bit, yeah.

00:21:39 ◼   ► That's one thing I was thinking about when we were talking about what you're doing there.

00:21:42 ◼   ► You're like, you're off the tech beat, you say.

00:21:45 ◼   ► But I kind of feel that the general consumer space and the tech world are kind of – that's sort of the story of this decade.

00:21:58 ◼   ► And I think it is – it just – yeah, yada, yada, yada.

00:22:04 ◼   ► But just mash it all together.

00:22:05 ◼   ► It sort of is part of the AI story, right?

00:22:10 ◼   ► Absolutely.

00:22:10 ◼   ► I mean, that was my kind of thesis when I started this is that tech is no longer an industry.

00:22:15 ◼   ► It's a layer on life.

00:22:16 ◼   ► It's just part of everything now.

00:22:18 ◼   ► So it's part of how you purchase things.

00:22:19 ◼   ► It's part of how you research.

00:22:21 ◼   ► It's part of how you entertain yourself.

00:22:22 ◼   ► Like, almost everything has a digital component to it these days other than maybe reading a newspaper or a paper book or something like that.

00:22:30 ◼   ► So, yeah, I mean, like the iPhone pocket is – actually, I forgot to link to it this week.

00:22:35 ◼   ► I'll do it next week.

00:22:36 ◼   ► And it's already sold out.

00:22:37 ◼   ► So I can't order one.

00:22:39 ◼   ► And I can't even go buy one.

00:22:41 ◼   ► This is – I scrolled all the way to the bottom of this announcement page.

00:22:45 ◼   ► It's fascinating.

00:22:46 ◼   ► They're selling it at 10 stores around the world.

00:22:49 ◼   ► Six of those 10 are in Asia.

00:22:51 ◼   ► Only one is in the U.S., in New York, in Soho.

00:22:56 ◼   ► So it's interesting to see which of the stores they're driving people toward for fashionable stuff.

00:23:01 ◼   ► Yeah, not Fifth Avenue in New York, Soho.

00:23:03 ◼   ► Not the global flagship, right, the Soho store.

00:23:06 ◼   ► Two in Europe – or three in Europe, Paris, Milan, and London.

00:23:10 ◼   ► And that's it.

00:23:11 ◼   ► So can't do it in L.A.

00:23:13 ◼   ► There's no store in L.A. that's chic enough to sell the Issey Miyake thing, pocket, which makes sense, to be honest.

00:23:22 ◼   ► And our stores here in Philadelphia are not really flagship-y.

00:23:28 ◼   ► We've got one really close to me here in Center City, which is nice, but sort of standard size.

00:23:35 ◼   ► The King of Prussia Mall one is a little bigger footprint, but not flagship quality.

00:23:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:23:43 ◼   ► And so it's hard to put a – because they're not going to say neither Apple or Issey Miyake, which I hope I'm – you know more about you.

00:23:50 ◼   ► I think that's correct, yeah.

00:23:51 ◼   ► Is it?

00:23:52 ◼   ► All right, Issey Miyake.

00:23:53 ◼   ► I believe so, yeah.

00:23:53 ◼   ► They're not saying how many they made, which I guess adds to the mystique, and I guess maybe it would be considered gauche if – to say it's a limited edition of 10,000, or I don't know what the number is.

00:24:07 ◼   ► So you don't know – I don't blame them for not saying how many they made, but then it puts the, hey, it sold out within an hour or so into, well, who knows what that means when they don't tell you how many they made.

00:24:20 ◼   ► But it did sell out.

00:24:21 ◼   ► So all the people laughing at the price, it's sort of like – I get it.

00:24:26 ◼   ► If you think $150 or $230 is ridiculous for a knitted sling for your phone, don't buy it.

00:24:34 ◼   ► But that's not a ridiculous price for a bag, and it's absolutely – if you look at everything else Issey Miyake sells from clothing to other bags and stuff, it's actually on the lower end of the price range.

00:24:49 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, Issey Miyake is not a luxury brand, but, like, not cheap either, and $150 – like, people buy a pair of socks for $150.

00:24:57 ◼   ► Like, pricing these days, it's hard to get too upset about any pricing because there's so many different things at every section of the pricing range.

00:25:06 ◼   ► I don't – how much were iPod socks?

00:25:09 ◼   ► Probably not.

00:25:10 ◼   ► So they – I wouldn't have known off the top of my head a week ago, but because of the resurgence and interest in iPod socks, I can tell you, A, that they were only sold in six-packs, where you got all six colors.

00:25:24 ◼   ► Oh, wow.

00:25:25 ◼   ► But this is about 21, 22 years ago, I think.

00:25:28 ◼   ► I think it was, like, 2004.

00:25:29 ◼   ► They were – a six-pack was $29, and I happen to know that inflation adjusted to 2025, that's about $50.

00:25:38 ◼   ► So in today's dollars, it would be six for $50, so $9 each.

00:25:45 ◼   ► Yeah, so this is, like, the Hermes Apple Watch version of the iPod sock.

00:25:50 ◼   ► Right.

00:25:51 ◼   ► By the way, not to use the trope, but I think Steve would have dug this.

00:25:55 ◼   ► Like, obviously, he bought all his shirts from there.

00:25:58 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:25:58 ◼   ► This is cool.

00:25:59 ◼   ► I like it.

00:26:00 ◼   ► I would never hold my iPhone like this at all, but I kind of want one, and I think it's cool.

00:26:06 ◼   ► Yeah, I kind of want to see one because it looks – I wouldn't use it.

00:26:09 ◼   ► That's the crazy part.

00:26:11 ◼   ► And I also think it's a little odd that the – there's two sizes.

00:26:17 ◼   ► That's the difference between $150 and $230, and the $230 longer one, which actually looks

00:26:23 ◼   ► more interesting to me because it would go over your shoulder, is only available in three

00:26:27 ◼   ► kind of boring colors, but the shorter one had – well, had, I should say, since they're

00:26:31 ◼   ► sold out, had more colors.

00:26:33 ◼   ► But I wish I could just see – I don't really want to buy one, but kind of wish they had

00:26:38 ◼   ► had them, for example, at the iPhone event back in September so I could have seen them

00:26:43 ◼   ► hands-on because I don't want to buy one, but I'd really like to play with one and see.

00:26:48 ◼   ► Yeah, unfortunately, the resale sites are already – it's like $360 to get one from my

00:26:54 ◼   ► Japanese resale site.

00:26:56 ◼   ► And there was – and it is interesting.

00:26:59 ◼   ► When the Sox came out 20 years ago, people laughed at them and thought it was stupid.

00:27:03 ◼   ► And I even looked back at a couple of posts I had on Daring Fireball about them, and it

00:27:09 ◼   ► was true.

00:27:09 ◼   ► It really – I remember – and it all kind of came back to me that a lot of people – even

00:27:13 ◼   ► though Steve Jobs personally introduced them on stage at an iPod event, he – and funny,

00:27:20 ◼   ► looking at the video, it's in the California Theater in San Jose.

00:27:24 ◼   ► I was not there.

00:27:24 ◼   ► It was like – whatever year it was, it might have been 2006, and I was writing Daring Fireball,

00:27:29 ◼   ► but I wasn't flying out to California for events regularly.

00:27:32 ◼   ► I was like at Macworld, thankfully, for the iPhone introduction in January 2006, but I didn't

00:27:38 ◼   ► go to – I didn't fly cross-country for everything.

00:27:40 ◼   ► But it's the California Theater, which is where I've had the live talk shows for the last few

00:27:47 ◼   ► years.

00:27:47 ◼   ► So it's weird watching Steve Jobs on stage – not on my stage, but on the only actual

00:27:53 ◼   ► stage I'm familiar with in recent years.

00:27:55 ◼   ► So, yeah, I know that stage.

00:27:57 ◼   ► I know exactly what that looks like backstage.

00:27:59 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure I thought the iPod socks were stupid, but –

00:28:04 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:28:04 ◼   ► But now they're funny.

00:28:05 ◼   ► People thought they were a joke, though.

00:28:07 ◼   ► Even after the event, they were like – they thought that Apple and Steve Jobs were putting

00:28:12 ◼   ► them on, and it's kind of – it's an interesting change for Apple 20 years because nobody – like

00:28:18 ◼   ► one of the many ways of epitomizing or putting your finger on the differences between Steve

00:28:23 ◼   ► Jobs and Tim Cook is it was within the realm of possibility that Steve Jobs would announce

00:28:29 ◼   ► a fake product on stage just to get a laugh and not even say, hey, this was fake, forget

00:28:36 ◼   ► about that.

00:28:36 ◼   ► He would just let you think it, and then it just never goes on sale, whereas nobody would

00:28:40 ◼   ► ever believe that Tim Cook would do that, right?

00:28:42 ◼   ► Never, yeah.

00:28:44 ◼   ► Never.

00:28:44 ◼   ► Nobody would ever think Tim Cook has announced a joke product.

00:28:47 ◼   ► But people thought they were a joke, but nobody really thought they were ridiculously priced,

00:28:52 ◼   ► right?

00:28:52 ◼   ► Six for $29 seemed like a pretty fair price.

00:28:55 ◼   ► And so with the iPod – iPhone – here I am calling it the iPod pocket – the iPhone pocket

00:29:01 ◼   ► this week, people laughed at it as being a stupid idea for the same reason as the socks, which

00:29:08 ◼   ► I think was just as wrong.

00:29:09 ◼   ► I think the socks were actually pretty cool, because we bought a pack, and I used it.

00:29:13 ◼   ► It was a great way –

00:29:14 ◼   ► I'm sure they would have been functional, yeah.

00:29:15 ◼   ► Yeah, it was a great –

00:29:16 ◼   ► I had the equivalent of that for, like, my Discman, so why wouldn't I have it for –

00:29:20 ◼   ► Yeah, it was a great way to put your iPod into a thing so you could just throw it in

00:29:25 ◼   ► your backpack or briefcase without worrying about it getting scratched or dinged up.

00:29:29 ◼   ► It had just enough padding.

00:29:30 ◼   ► It wasn't protective, but it was protective enough to bounce around a purse or a backpack.

00:29:36 ◼   ► And easy to get it in, easy to get it out.

00:29:38 ◼   ► The Issey Miyake pocket sling seems similar, and it's obviously future-proof because it's

00:29:46 ◼   ► not, like, precision-sized, oh, you have to get the iPhone 17 Pro Max-sized pocket.

00:29:52 ◼   ► No, it obviously is sort of like one pocket fits any iPhone or Android phone, right?

00:29:58 ◼   ► You could buy this Issey Miyake thing from an Apple store and then put your Android phone

00:30:02 ◼   ► in it.

00:30:02 ◼   ► Or a LaCroix or whatever you want.

00:30:05 ◼   ► I do notice a lot of people carrying their – well, I would say a lot, but there certainly

00:30:09 ◼   ► are people who carry their iPhones on one of those comically long lanyards or – and now

00:30:16 ◼   ► Apple sells those too.

00:30:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:30:18 ◼   ► I would be concerned about it flying and shattering on something, but people certainly do this.

00:30:24 ◼   ► I bet this will be widely knocked off.

00:30:27 ◼   ► I bet you'll be able to go and get a $19 version of this that is obviously not nearly

00:30:31 ◼   ► as nice.

00:30:32 ◼   ► But this now feels like something that will enter the culture.

00:30:36 ◼   ► Right.

00:30:37 ◼   ► In the same way that Apple's own Apple Watch straps cost – most of them cost $100, and even

00:30:44 ◼   ► the simplest ones cost $50, and you can go to the store or Amazon and find uncountable number

00:30:53 ◼   ► of Apple Watch straps for $10.

00:30:55 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:30:56 ◼   ► I bought the $12 Tmoo version of the – whatever this thing is called, the –

00:31:02 ◼   ► Oh, the loop.

00:31:03 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:31:03 ◼   ► Yeah, the climbing loop or whatever, the ultra one.

00:31:06 ◼   ► Very obvious the difference between Apple's $100 version and the $12.

00:31:11 ◼   ► You know what's funny?

00:31:12 ◼   ► I bought the Tmoo version of that too because it was like a year or two ago when Tmoo was

00:31:17 ◼   ► number one in the app store.

00:31:18 ◼   ► I was like, I got to try this app.

00:31:19 ◼   ► It was my test order.

00:31:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:31:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:31:21 ◼   ► I got the orange one from like the first year of the ultra.

00:31:23 ◼   ► I got the orange climbing loop or whatever that's called, ultra band.

00:31:28 ◼   ► I bought a pair of knockoff AirPods and a pair of Lenovo wireless earbuds that – Tmoo

00:31:39 ◼   ► called them Lenovo, and I was like, there is no way this is actually from Lenovo, and they

00:31:45 ◼   ► weren't.

00:31:45 ◼   ► They were just a total ripoff that just said Lenovo on them and didn't really try to pretend

00:31:51 ◼   ► too heavily that they weren't.

00:31:52 ◼   ► And then, I don't know, I went back within six weeks and they were gone, obviously.

00:31:57 ◼   ► Somebody, some lawyer at Lenovo sent them like a what the fuck letter and it was removed.

00:32:03 ◼   ► But yeah.

00:32:05 ◼   ► So, I mean, it's – and I think just like with Apple Watches where it's like you can say

00:32:09 ◼   ► you think it's stupid that Hermes sells $500 link bracelets and I don't know how much the

00:32:17 ◼   ► leather ones cost now, but they're obviously much more expensive, hundreds of dollars.

00:32:21 ◼   ► You don't have to buy it.

00:32:23 ◼   ► And it's not like they're the only – if they were the only Apple Watch straps available,

00:32:27 ◼   ► then yes, you could complain about it.

00:32:29 ◼   ► And if this was the only way to put an iPhone over your shoulder, then I – for some kind

00:32:34 ◼   ► of – if there was like a DRM equivalent digital connection that you had to be digitally signed

00:32:43 ◼   ► and authorized to put your iPhone in a sling over your shoulder and the only way to do

00:32:47 ◼   ► it was to spend $150 from Issey Miyake, then that would be worth complaining about.

00:32:51 ◼   ► But Apple itself makes a lower cost over the shoulder sling.

00:32:56 ◼   ► It is – it is interesting.

00:32:58 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:32:59 ◼   ► I think it's cool.

00:33:00 ◼   ► I wish – I had thought that the Apple Watch era would bring actually more of these types

00:33:05 ◼   ► of partnerships.

00:33:06 ◼   ► And I guess it's hard for Apple to do that these days because they're so big and everything

00:33:13 ◼   ► they do.

00:33:13 ◼   ► I guess this is kind of an interesting example of something that's not that big.

00:33:17 ◼   ► And on purpose, it's not that big.

00:33:19 ◼   ► They're not offering it in all their stores.

00:33:21 ◼   ► There was not a huge inventory available, and I'm sure there are some people who are frustrated

00:33:27 ◼   ► that they can't buy one.

00:33:28 ◼   ► But I think it's kind of cool for them to do something small like that because it's really

00:33:33 ◼   ► hard when you're that big to do anything small.

00:33:36 ◼   ► And I don't know if it's sustainable for them to do a lot of stuff like this, but I think

00:33:41 ◼   ► it's kind of cool.

00:33:42 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so too.

00:33:44 ◼   ► Let's look up how much an Hermes strap is.

00:33:47 ◼   ► How much do you think?

00:33:49 ◼   ► Looks like you can get a strap for like $349 from Hermes for the – yeah.

00:33:56 ◼   ► For one – one is $419.

00:33:58 ◼   ► Looks like different.

00:34:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:34:01 ◼   ► Yeah, like $300, $400 depending on which one.

00:34:04 ◼   ► And obviously the metal ones cost a little more.

00:34:07 ◼   ► But again, they're not the only Apple Watch straps.

00:34:09 ◼   ► So I don't know.

00:34:11 ◼   ► I think that the people's complaint about this.

00:34:13 ◼   ► And I kind of feel like, as you hinted there, it might go over better if Apple did more

00:34:19 ◼   ► of this.

00:34:20 ◼   ► And obviously, I even zinged them a little on one of my posts this week where I said my

00:34:25 ◼   ► headline was, I guess they're down to 999 no's for every yes.

00:34:29 ◼   ► That's just sort of gentle kidding.

00:34:32 ◼   ► Because I do support them doing stuff like this, and I feel like it would go over better

00:34:36 ◼   ► if they did a little bit more of them, right?

00:34:38 ◼   ► And obviously, it would be wrong for the Apple brand to do a lot of them.

00:34:43 ◼   ► But doing a couple more a year, at least like one a season, I think would make it go over

00:34:49 ◼   ► better.

00:34:49 ◼   ► What's Apple's surprise partnership this season?

00:34:53 ◼   ► Yeah, and this is purely, I mean, this is probably 95% fashion, 5% utility.

00:34:59 ◼   ► Although maybe not.

00:34:59 ◼   ► Maybe that's not generous enough.

00:35:01 ◼   ► But perhaps some of the stuff could be a little more, although I guess the utility-driven stuff,

00:35:06 ◼   ► they would not want to artificially have scarcity.

00:35:09 ◼   ► So if there's anything that's really about getting more use out of something, they should

00:35:14 ◼   ► have as many of those as possible.

00:35:15 ◼   ► But yeah, I think it's cool.

00:35:18 ◼   ► I mean, there's few brands that are deserving of an Apple partnership.

00:35:21 ◼   ► That's part of the problem.

00:35:22 ◼   ► You could even question, is Nike the right athletic partner these days?

00:35:25 ◼   ► I think it probably still is because of its global positioning and all that sort of stuff.

00:35:30 ◼   ► But if it were today, I don't know.

00:35:31 ◼   ► Would it be Nike or would it be someone else?

00:35:33 ◼   ► Yeah, I wonder too.

00:35:35 ◼   ► And I wonder, you know, it's a small thing.

00:35:38 ◼   ► And I don't think people second guess it much.

00:35:41 ◼   ► But I think I'm pretty sure Tim Cook is still on the Nike board.

00:35:45 ◼   ► And so that's...

00:35:46 ◼   ► I think so, yeah.

00:35:46 ◼   ► Yeah, and I sort of think, in a way, that's sort of a conflict of interest.

00:35:52 ◼   ► Right?

00:35:52 ◼   ► I thought about this too recently.

00:35:54 ◼   ► It definitely was during the fuel band era.

00:35:56 ◼   ► Well, but effectively, I think they were pretty upfront about this, that as a member of the

00:36:02 ◼   ► board, he, with the permission of the Apple board, had let Nike know what Apple was doing

00:36:07 ◼   ► and steered Nike away from making their own smartwatches and towards being a partner for

00:36:14 ◼   ► Apple watch.

00:36:15 ◼   ► But again, that's a good counter to the Hermes thing, where the Nike ones don't cost more,

00:36:20 ◼   ► right?

00:36:20 ◼   ► They're like the same price as the regular sport models.

00:36:24 ◼   ► They just come with Nike-style bands and some custom Nike watch faces.

00:36:31 ◼   ► But I kind of feel like it hasn't been a great five years, 10 years for Nike as a company.

00:36:38 ◼   ► They obviously made some stumbles.

00:36:42 ◼   ► New consumer-ish ones that you're probably well aware of, where their sort of direct-to-consumer

00:36:48 ◼   ► push had them.

00:36:50 ◼   ► They sort of lost their status in some ways.

00:36:53 ◼   ► They're sort of undeniable status as the king of the sneakers.

00:36:57 ◼   ► I think Apple has less flexibility to pick a new partner, because it's not just shoes,

00:37:02 ◼   ► right?

00:37:02 ◼   ► It's just the whole athletic, who's our athletic partner?

00:37:05 ◼   ► With Tim Cook on their board, they kind of don't have any flexibility in that regard.

00:37:09 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think it's still the most prestigious global sports brand.

00:37:15 ◼   ► Maybe not what the cool runners on the West Side Highway are wearing these days, but that's

00:37:20 ◼   ► not Apple either.

00:37:21 ◼   ► Yeah, and I guess if Tim Cook really felt like it was a poor deal for Apple, he'd resign

00:37:26 ◼   ► from the Nike board, right?

00:37:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:37:28 ◼   ► Steve Jobs used to do stuff like that all the time.

00:37:32 ◼   ► He'd sell all his stock except for one share to make a stink, right?

00:37:37 ◼   ► It would be like, ah, I'm sick of Nike.

00:37:39 ◼   ► It's, again, very different from Tim Cook.

00:37:41 ◼   ► I think he'd be very reticent to make the public stink of, hey, Tim Cook just resigned from the

00:37:47 ◼   ► Nike board and says the company was run by bozos.

00:37:50 ◼   ► I don't see him doing that.

00:37:52 ◼   ► No.

00:37:53 ◼   ► It happened every few years with Steve Jobs.

00:37:55 ◼   ► Yeah, that was a different era, too.

00:37:58 ◼   ► But yeah, I think you're right.

00:38:00 ◼   ► I'm not sure Tim Cook has ever publicly called anybody a bozo.

00:38:03 ◼   ► I can't recall.

00:38:05 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:38:05 ◼   ► Probably has never happened.

00:38:07 ◼   ► What else is on the list?

00:38:09 ◼   ► Do you want to talk about the iPhone Air?

00:38:11 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:38:13 ◼   ► I still have it.

00:38:16 ◼   ► Are you using one still?

00:38:16 ◼   ► Yeah, I was going to ask.

00:38:17 ◼   ► Yeah, I still have my review units and I still haven't written my reviews.

00:38:20 ◼   ► Here.

00:38:21 ◼   ► Here's the Air.

00:38:23 ◼   ► Is that your main phone number hooked up to that one or no?

00:38:27 ◼   ► I guess it's about two months since I've had both and I think I've gone about 50-50 with

00:38:33 ◼   ► the 17 Pro and the iPhone Air.

00:38:35 ◼   ► I've been telling myself I should write the reviews first and then purchase my own phone

00:38:40 ◼   ► and I'm 90-some percent sure I should purchase a 17 Pro because I really do use the extra lenses

00:38:48 ◼   ► on the camera, especially the telephoto.

00:38:51 ◼   ► And to me, the killer thing about the Air is I don't like how big the screen is.

00:38:57 ◼   ► It is a much nicer phone to put in your pocket and the weight difference, the thinness combined,

00:39:05 ◼   ► the lighter weight and the thinness really do make it nicer to keep in your pocket.

00:39:10 ◼   ► But I don't think it's nicer in hand because it's just too big for me side to side.

00:39:17 ◼   ► I actually think the 17 Pro is a little too big and wish that they'd shrink that down area-wise.

00:39:25 ◼   ► It is a bit more like holding a pancake than a sandwich, right?

00:39:29 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:39:30 ◼   ► Something like that.

00:39:33 ◼   ► I really wish that they had made two sizes of the Air.

00:39:37 ◼   ► Like what they effectively did is they sort of split the difference between the regular

00:39:43 ◼   ► and large size of iPhones, right?

00:39:45 ◼   ► The Pro and the Pro Max and split the difference and made one size pretty much right in the middle

00:39:53 ◼   ► in terms of area, just width times height, ignoring the thickness for the Air.

00:39:59 ◼   ► And I kind of wish they had just made two sizes, made one that was the max size and one that's

00:40:05 ◼   ► the regular size.

00:40:06 ◼   ► And if they had made a regular size of the Air, then without question, that's the one I would

00:40:11 ◼   ► buy, even with only one camera lens.

00:40:13 ◼   ► That's how much I like it.

00:40:15 ◼   ► I need to spend some more time with that.

00:40:17 ◼   ► I've tried it in the store.

00:40:19 ◼   ► I think that the size...

00:40:21 ◼   ► I did a year with the Pro Max and that was just too big, like running shorts.

00:40:26 ◼   ► It just was not tenable for running this giant thing in your pocket.

00:40:33 ◼   ► But obviously the context of this week is like all these stories about production being reduced

00:40:42 ◼   ► and I don't know how you'd like to summarize it.

00:40:46 ◼   ► Well, I think there's so much...

00:40:49 ◼   ► I'm always loathe to put too much credence in anybody other than Apple's remarks on how

00:40:56 ◼   ► well anything is selling because they're so secretive and they just don't announce per

00:41:00 ◼   ► product numbers.

00:41:02 ◼   ► But when so many people are saying, hey, they've cut production, it's disappointing compared

00:41:08 ◼   ► to what they expected.

00:41:09 ◼   ► It's only about one out of every ten of the new...

00:41:14 ◼   ► Of people buying any of the new phones, the 17 regular, 17 Pro and Pro Max and the iPhone

00:41:21 ◼   ► Air, which very still curiously doesn't have the 17 number.

00:41:26 ◼   ► Only about one in ten of those phones is an iPhone Air, which isn't terrible.

00:41:31 ◼   ► But it's...

00:41:32 ◼   ► I think they obviously thought or hoped it would be more higher than one in ten.

00:41:37 ◼   ► I don't know how much higher, but...

00:41:40 ◼   ► Yeah, hard to know.

00:41:41 ◼   ► I mean, obviously there's a target and they're either hitting the target or they're not.

00:41:46 ◼   ► And for years I was always really, really reluctant to amplify those.

00:41:52 ◼   ► Production has been cut by 70% stories because a lot of times those are written by people who

00:41:58 ◼   ► have no idea how production works.

00:41:59 ◼   ► I don't know how production works.

00:42:01 ◼   ► I bet there's a ramp down every year no matter what.

00:42:04 ◼   ► And it's, is this a bigger ramp down than they expected to make or not?

00:42:07 ◼   ► And that, there are people who know the answer to that.

00:42:09 ◼   ► Many of them work at Apple.

00:42:10 ◼   ► Many of them work in the supply chain.

00:42:12 ◼   ► But it does feel...

00:42:14 ◼   ► I don't, I have not seen one in the wild.

00:42:16 ◼   ► Now, granted, I now live mostly in LA where people are not on the subway or flashing their

00:42:21 ◼   ► new phones and stuff like that.

00:42:22 ◼   ► But I too thought maybe, oh, I should buy this and went to the store, played with it and got

00:42:30 ◼   ► really, really nervous and defensive about not having a zoom lens, which I don't even know

00:42:36 ◼   ► how much I use.

00:42:36 ◼   ► I tried to go in the photos app and see if there was a way to filter by how many pictures

00:42:40 ◼   ► I've taken.

00:42:41 ◼   ► Is there a way to do that?

00:42:42 ◼   ► There is.

00:42:43 ◼   ► And I, you know what?

00:42:44 ◼   ► I'm going to write this down.

00:42:45 ◼   ► Look at it.

00:42:45 ◼   ► You can see me with my pen and paper.

00:42:47 ◼   ► I'm writing this down.

00:42:48 ◼   ► I am going to link to it.

00:42:49 ◼   ► I think Jason Snell had the best article, but I will be sure.

00:42:53 ◼   ► I will get this into the show notes somehow.

00:42:55 ◼   ► What you have to do is make a smart album.

00:42:57 ◼   ► You can't just query live.

00:42:59 ◼   ► Go to photos on the Mac.

00:43:01 ◼   ► I don't think you can do smart albums on iOS, but on photos for Mac, make a smart album and

00:43:07 ◼   ► make the smart criteria, which camera.

00:43:10 ◼   ► And as the camera pick the model iPhone that you want to target, and then you can then add

00:43:18 ◼   ► another criteria for the smart album that is lens and you find the lens, but you've got

00:43:23 ◼   ► to, it's a little tricky because it's, I think in photos, it goes by the actual millimeters,

00:43:29 ◼   ► not the simulated millimeters.

00:43:32 ◼   ► So they'll say like, for example, the way that they say that the one X main camera is 24

00:43:38 ◼   ► millimeters.

00:43:38 ◼   ► That's in 35 millimeter film photography terms.

00:43:43 ◼   ► It's actually like 4.7 millimeters because the sensor is so much smaller than an actual

00:43:49 ◼   ► 35 millimeter diagonal piece of film negative.

00:43:52 ◼   ► So you've got to figure out like it's the 4.7 millimeter.

00:43:56 ◼   ► But anyway, you can do that through a smart album.

00:43:58 ◼   ► And well, then it's like, well, perhaps I've taken all these pictures, but what am I actually

00:44:04 ◼   ► using?

00:44:04 ◼   ► What actually matters?

00:44:06 ◼   ► Is it like what I post to Instagram?

00:44:08 ◼   ► Is it what I send to my family?

00:44:11 ◼   ► Like which photos actually matter?

00:44:12 ◼   ► And then maybe I would convince myself that I would be completely fine with a delightfully

00:44:20 ◼   ► thin phone without six cameras or whatever it is.

00:44:24 ◼   ► I'm very much an air person.

00:44:26 ◼   ► Like I have a MacBook air.

00:44:27 ◼   ► I've would always get the thinnest iPad you can get.

00:44:31 ◼   ► I love this felt nature of it.

00:44:33 ◼   ► One of the things that I feel is still missing from the Mac lineup is the ultra thin, not as

00:44:39 ◼   ► fast, but almost pocketable.

00:44:41 ◼   ► The, the, what was it?

00:44:42 ◼   ► The MacBook adorable.

00:44:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:44:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:44:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:44:45 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:44:45 ◼   ► The MacBook one.

00:44:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:44:47 ◼   ► The MacBook one.

00:44:48 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:44:48 ◼   ► I miss that.

00:44:50 ◼   ► And, and I feel like the iPhone air, maybe the, just maybe the slightly wrong trade-offs.

00:44:56 ◼   ► I saw some people making the analogy to the iPhone 10, which had some other trade-backs

00:45:02 ◼   ► versus the, whatever the numbered ones that.

00:45:05 ◼   ► It was the iPhone eight at the exact same time.

00:45:08 ◼   ► There never was an iPhone nine, but in the year 2019, I believe, I don't know.

00:45:15 ◼   ► We can do the math, but 2018.

00:45:16 ◼   ► No, no.

00:45:17 ◼   ► I think it was 18 because it was, I think I was in Japan when the, when the 10 pre-orders,

00:45:23 ◼   ► I think we were in a, in a bath house with Craig Mott ordering.

00:45:26 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:45:27 ◼   ► Because the 10 was 10 years or 10th version.

00:45:30 ◼   ► And the first one came out in 2007.

00:45:32 ◼   ► So it was the 10th model.

00:45:34 ◼   ► So therefore it was 2018.

00:45:36 ◼   ► I think it was 17 then.

00:45:36 ◼   ► Okay.

00:45:37 ◼   ► Well, maybe it was 2018.

00:45:38 ◼   ► I forget.

00:45:39 ◼   ► I guess we could.

00:45:39 ◼   ► We could look it up.

00:45:41 ◼   ► We can find this out.

00:45:42 ◼   ► But anyway, like the, for me, the, what the, the main reason to buy that phone, obviously

00:45:48 ◼   ► besides the fact that it was the new phone was the, the face ID paradigm, which meant you

00:45:52 ◼   ► no longer had to deal with the home button and you were in the future of face ID.

00:45:56 ◼   ► And so the trade-offs, whatever the trade-offs were, I don't even remember what they were.

00:46:00 ◼   ► Didn't matter because that was very clearly the future of where, where this was going.

00:46:05 ◼   ► I guess the trade-off was like the notch.

00:46:07 ◼   ► It was 2017 by the 2017, 10 years.

00:46:10 ◼   ► Whereas this one, it's like pretty clear that you're either getting the, the super thin,

00:46:16 ◼   ► like ultra nice phone or you're getting all the cameras and it is hard for me.

00:46:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:46:26 ◼   ► I think it's hard for a lot of people.

00:46:27 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:46:28 ◼   ► But it's weird.

00:46:30 ◼   ► And I don't think I'm too much of a knee jerk contrarian, but I think two, three weeks

00:46:37 ◼   ► ago, I was much closer to 99% sure that I should buy a 17 pro and all of the sort of, Hey, nobody

00:46:46 ◼   ► likes the iPhone air.

00:46:48 ◼   ► And I just pissed on a wall street journal report this week about the iPhone air where

00:46:54 ◼   ► I really feel like they really unfairly.

00:46:57 ◼   ► It's a news story.

00:46:58 ◼   ► So it's not from their tech columnists like Joanna Stern and, and Nicole Nguyen.

00:47:04 ◼   ► It was a news story where, because it's a news story, the reporters couldn't say it.

00:47:09 ◼   ► They just found a guy who was a former Apple product manager who said he bought one and at

00:47:15 ◼   ► his wedding, he took worse.

00:47:17 ◼   ► His photos looked substantially worse than his brother and his brother had the 17 pro.

00:47:23 ◼   ► And I don't believe it.

00:47:24 ◼   ► I really don't.

00:47:25 ◼   ► Cause I've taken pictures side by side with the two.

00:47:28 ◼   ► And yes, cause it only has one camera lens.

00:47:30 ◼   ► If his brother was taking four X zoom pictures and he's taking pictures with the air from the

00:47:36 ◼   ► same distance of the same subjects.

00:47:38 ◼   ► Well then, yeah, it's going to look like shit because you don't have a zoom lens, but the

00:47:43 ◼   ► zoom lenses, even on the 17 pro, the best zoom lenses Apple's ever made are substantially

00:47:49 ◼   ► worse cameras.

00:47:50 ◼   ► Just from a pure photo nerd technical aspect, it is a substantially worse camera than the

00:47:59 ◼   ► one X camera.

00:48:00 ◼   ► The one X camera is just better.

00:48:02 ◼   ► It's for optical reasons for the reason that they know that that's the lens that most people

00:48:08 ◼   ► use.

00:48:09 ◼   ► Most of the time it's where they invest the money, but just optically, it's harder to get

00:48:13 ◼   ► a telephoto lens that doesn't stick out.

00:48:17 ◼   ► Like when you look at real cameras and you look at telephoto lenses that are longer distance

00:48:24 ◼   ► that have more reach.

00:48:24 ◼   ► Those are the lenses that stick out from the camera more.

00:48:28 ◼   ► So how on an iPhone or any smartphone does the telephoto lens not stick out more?

00:48:35 ◼   ► It's a very tricky problem, but one of the ways that they make it work is by sacrificing image

00:48:40 ◼   ► quality and, and how, how much light gets in, et cetera.

00:48:44 ◼   ► You can't really cheat physics.

00:48:46 ◼   ► And so there's a reason why optically, you know, in terms of getting the best possible

00:48:51 ◼   ► picture you can get on your phone, it's always going to be with the main one X lens and the

00:48:56 ◼   ► one X lens on the iPhone air is really good.

00:48:59 ◼   ► It is not as good as the 17 pro, but it's as good as like a pro iPhone pro from a couple

00:49:05 ◼   ► years ago.

00:49:06 ◼   ► And I think in the hands of most people, they, and into the eyes of most people side

00:49:12 ◼   ► by side photos with the main camera on a 17 pro and an iPhone air, they would be very hard

00:49:19 ◼   ► pressed to tell the difference pixel peeping that you'd have to really zoom in to see the

00:49:24 ◼   ► differences.

00:49:24 ◼   ► So I think the way that the wall street journal presented it, and I just can't even imagine

00:49:29 ◼   ► how many people are.

00:49:29 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:49:29 ◼   ► I read in a wall street journal that the camera stinks on the iPhone air, right?

00:49:33 ◼   ► That's the just, that's the takeaway from the lead of their story.

00:49:36 ◼   ► Oh, the iPhone air.

00:49:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:49:37 ◼   ► It's really cool to hold and it's super thin, but the camera stinks.

00:49:40 ◼   ► I read it in a wall street journal and that's just not true.

00:49:43 ◼   ► It's absolutely not true.

00:49:45 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:49:45 ◼   ► It's a shame.

00:49:46 ◼   ► I mean, again, contrarian, I mean, now I want to buy one.

00:49:50 ◼   ► I do.

00:49:50 ◼   ► I just want to like, I'm going to go play again.

00:49:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:49:56 ◼   ► I ended up not ordering a new phone yet because I'm on the upgrade program and we just finally

00:50:01 ◼   ► hit our 12 month cycle.

00:50:03 ◼   ► So eventually we tried doing it early, but everything was sold out.

00:50:06 ◼   ► So, or at least the pros were sold out.

00:50:09 ◼   ► This is like kind of where we are with the iPhone.

00:50:11 ◼   ► Like the pro is, it is totally fine.

00:50:14 ◼   ► Like it is small enough.

00:50:16 ◼   ► It is light enough.

00:50:17 ◼   ► It is totally fine and it does an amazing job and never flakes out.

00:50:22 ◼   ► So there's no, oh man, I never, I never sit there thinking, man, I wish this phone were

00:50:27 ◼   ► a lot different than it is.

00:50:29 ◼   ► Cause it's so good.

00:50:29 ◼   ► It's, it's an amazing piece of, I wish it were lighter.

00:50:32 ◼   ► I mean, how can you not wish it were lighter?

00:50:34 ◼   ► Right.

00:50:34 ◼   ► But then, yeah.

00:50:35 ◼   ► But then you pick one up that's lighter and you go, oh, same with the iPad pro.

00:50:39 ◼   ► You take it out of the case and you're like, what is this thing?

00:50:42 ◼   ► Like, how is this so light?

00:50:44 ◼   ► This is amazing.

00:50:46 ◼   ► So I do feel that.

00:50:49 ◼   ► And, and so I am very intrigued by it and yeah, maybe I'll, the other thing is the iPhone

00:50:57 ◼   ► camera is almost too good now.

00:50:59 ◼   ► Like the, all the stuff that it does between HDR and, and all the other tweaks that they

00:51:06 ◼   ► do to your pictures, it's almost, it almost feels like it's not a photo.

00:51:09 ◼   ► Obviously people have had this conversation a million times, but that is one of the reasons

00:51:12 ◼   ► that I think you're also a Rico guy picked up the GR3s because it actually, you know,

00:51:16 ◼   ► it actually feels like you're shooting photography again, even though that is obviously digital

00:51:21 ◼   ► too.

00:51:21 ◼   ► And, and they encourage you to use all these filters and, and things like that.

00:51:25 ◼   ► But to me, and I, and I actually never take it anywhere.

00:51:28 ◼   ► So I have the Ricoh GR3s and the difference between the three and the 3x is the focal distance.

00:51:37 ◼   ► It's a fixed focal focus lens.

00:51:40 ◼   ► The GR3 is like a 28 millimeter equivalent, which is pretty much like the iPhone 1x camera, except

00:51:50 ◼   ► I think it's when you switch to 1.2 zoom because the iPhone 1x is so wide now.

00:51:55 ◼   ► And my 3x is more of a 40 millimeter equivalent.

00:51:59 ◼   ► Maybe it's a 41 or 42.

00:52:01 ◼   ► I think Rico calls it 40, but it's really more like 41 or two.

00:52:05 ◼   ► So it's a little bit more like 1.8 or 9x on a, in iPhone terms, which is really more like

00:52:13 ◼   ► that sweet spot of 2x, which is the normal 50 millimeter lens from classic photography days.

00:52:20 ◼   ► And I bought the 3x instead of the 3 because I thought, well, I shoot so many goddamn photos

00:52:27 ◼   ► at the 20 some millimeter equivalent, wide-ish angle with my phone.

00:52:33 ◼   ► I want a different perspective on the phone when I, when I bring my Rico around.

00:52:38 ◼   ► And for years and years, when I first got into digital photography, I, when I, when I first bought

00:52:45 ◼   ► like a Canon SLR, the only lens I used was a 50 millimeter fixed prime lens.

00:52:51 ◼   ► Oh, nice.

00:52:51 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:52:52 ◼   ► The pancake.

00:52:53 ◼   ► I didn't have the pancake.

00:52:54 ◼   ► I, although eventually I bought one.

00:52:56 ◼   ► I bought, I bought the 40 millimeter pancake, but it was just, I, for years, all I had was

00:53:01 ◼   ► the, the, the $85 plastic 50 millimeter F1.8.

00:53:06 ◼   ► Amazing.

00:53:06 ◼   ► That was so good.

00:53:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:53:07 ◼   ► It, it's kind of noisy.

00:53:09 ◼   ► It has a, it feels like a sort of shitty build quality, but I, I used it for years and

00:53:14 ◼   ► years and it's Canon makes good stuff.

00:53:16 ◼   ► And even the plastic $85 50 millimeter lens lasted forever.

00:53:22 ◼   ► And then eventually I bought, I splurged and bought the F 1.2 50 millimeter lens, which

00:53:29 ◼   ► I think is like 15, it's 1500 bucks.

00:53:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:53:33 ◼   ► And it was, I, I waited too long to do it.

00:53:38 ◼   ► It was like, I couldn't, when I bought, when I bought the F 1.8 50 millimeter

00:53:44 ◼   ► lens, I should put links to all these in the show notes.

00:53:47 ◼   ► It was because that's what my budget allowed.

00:53:49 ◼   ► And it was a great lens, but the, there's one Canon makes one in the middle, which is the

00:53:54 ◼   ► really the sweet spot.

00:53:56 ◼   ► It's the F 1.4 50 millimeter.

00:53:58 ◼   ► And I think it's three or 400 bucks.

00:54:00 ◼   ► It's probably like four or at least it was then it was like 400 bucks.

00:54:04 ◼   ► And it's a little bit faster.

00:54:06 ◼   ► F 1.4 instead of F 1.8 and a little bit heavier because of the better build quality.

00:54:13 ◼   ► The F 1.2 got you like a full extra stop, but just one more stop than F 1.4, but was, it's

00:54:22 ◼   ► way heavier.

00:54:23 ◼   ► It's like the glass.

00:54:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:54:25 ◼   ► The glass, the amount of literal actual glass to get you from F 1.4 to F 1.2 is a lot and

00:54:32 ◼   ► it's really heavy and you notice it and it's like, ah, this kind of sucks.

00:54:35 ◼   ► And you're all, I was always very cognizant.

00:54:38 ◼   ► Now I'm wearing a $1,500 lens around my neck and I'm like, careful, be careful, be careful.

00:54:44 ◼   ► It's like when you're, when you have the F 1.8 $50 or $85 lens, which is probably, I don't

00:54:50 ◼   ► know, it's probably 120 now or something, but you just, you don't worry about it.

00:54:54 ◼   ► You're like, well, the worst thing that could possibly happen is I break the lens and I'm

00:54:57 ◼   ► out a hundred dollars, right?

00:54:59 ◼   ► When you have a $1,500 lens around your neck, you're like, stay, stay away from kids, stay

00:55:03 ◼   ► away from water, stay away from everything.

00:55:05 ◼   ► And you're constantly thinking I've got $1,500 around my neck.

00:55:10 ◼   ► It's, it's like walking around with $1,500 just in your hand, which we do now with our

00:55:16 ◼   ► phones.

00:55:16 ◼   ► But I think after I bought my GR3, we tweeted about this.

00:55:20 ◼   ► And now I think if I got a GR4, I would get the X cause I do, I like shooting landscapes and

00:55:26 ◼   ► like street scenes and all that kind of stuff.

00:55:28 ◼   ► But I do, I totally get where you are, especially when shooting people, the, the slightly more

00:55:34 ◼   ► zoomed in thing, that constraint actually makes for a more interesting picture.

00:55:38 ◼   ► And obviously it'd be great to have both.

00:55:41 ◼   ► That's that defeats the purpose of having a pocket size camera, but yeah, I love it.

00:55:46 ◼   ► I don't take it with me often, but when I do, I'm glad I have it.

00:55:51 ◼   ► I take it to family events a lot and I, I still like glass, this photo sharing network, but,

00:55:58 ◼   ► and I do share images there occasionally, but not as often as I used to, because there's

00:56:02 ◼   ► something about glass, the culture there is, Hey, this is only for the keepers.

00:56:07 ◼   ► Hmm.

00:56:08 ◼   ► You know, it's like, this is, and it, a lot of my keepers are ones that are private.

00:56:13 ◼   ► I don't want to share photos of my nieces and nephews or something like that.

00:56:17 ◼   ► And they're the ones I, somebody just commented like, Hey, are you still using your Rico?

00:56:20 ◼   ► You haven't posted anything from your Rico to glass in a while.

00:56:23 ◼   ► All your photos on glass are from the iPhone.

00:56:25 ◼   ► And it's, I didn't even think about it.

00:56:27 ◼   ► It wasn't strategic.

00:56:28 ◼   ► And I searched in photos.

00:56:30 ◼   ► I did a thing just like I told you about, like to see how many photos I took with the

00:56:34 ◼   ► Rico in the last year.

00:56:35 ◼   ► And I actually took more in the last year than I took the year before with the same camera.

00:56:40 ◼   ► So I'm using it about the same, but it was actually slightly up, but I'm just not sharing

00:56:45 ◼   ► any of them publicly.

00:56:46 ◼   ► Cause they were all from like family events.

00:56:48 ◼   ► It's a good camera.

00:56:50 ◼   ► I really, and I, I loved my old Rico GR from back in like the 2000s, which I is the only

00:56:56 ◼   ► digital camera I ever used until it broke.

00:56:58 ◼   ► It literally, the motor that made the lens come out actually wound up just wearing out.

00:57:05 ◼   ► It was, it, it was a great camera back in the day, but I'm, I have that muscle memory as

00:57:10 ◼   ► a photographer of having a fixed focal length lens, just like on a 35 millimeter camera, I've

00:57:17 ◼   ► got a 50 millimeter lens.

00:57:18 ◼   ► And if I want a different frame, I've got to move my feet.

00:57:22 ◼   ► I've got to move the actual camera to get it.

00:57:25 ◼   ► Whereas my last SLR lens was at 18 to 270.

00:57:29 ◼   ► So stupid.

00:57:31 ◼   ► Nothing looked good coming out of that thing, but it is insane, right?

00:57:37 ◼   ► It's, it was nuts.

00:57:38 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:57:38 ◼   ► It was a 10 and it was like 400 bucks or something or 800.

00:57:41 ◼   ► And there is the, the, the prototypical scenario that anybody who's a parent run in runs into

00:57:49 ◼   ► is the school auditorium, right?

00:57:52 ◼   ► And you come in, you get your seat.

00:57:55 ◼   ► It is probably not in the front row and you want to get a picture of your kid on stage and

00:58:02 ◼   ► you really need a lens with reach to do that or else it's really going to look like, I don't

00:58:08 ◼   ► even know whose kid this is.

00:58:09 ◼   ► If you just hold your iPhone, if you only use the one X lens on an iPhone air from the middle

00:58:15 ◼   ► of the school auditorium, you're kind of have to squint to see if it's your kid.

00:58:20 ◼   ► Is that scenario enough to change which phone you buy?

00:58:24 ◼   ► I would say if you're a parent, maybe buy a digital standalone camera with a zoom lens

00:58:29 ◼   ► for those events.

00:58:30 ◼   ► If you care about them, do you really want to make your 365 day a year own it for two or

00:58:37 ◼   ► three years iPhone decision based on the two or three school events a year where you cannot

00:58:42 ◼   ► get closer to the subject you want to capture?

00:58:45 ◼   ► And you will only watch that video once.

00:58:48 ◼   ► Right.

00:58:49 ◼   ► Or twice maybe.

00:58:50 ◼   ► Right.

00:58:51 ◼   ► I do.

00:58:52 ◼   ► I'm kind of talking myself.

00:58:53 ◼   ► There's this contrarian streak in me that is, fuck these people.

00:58:57 ◼   ► I'm going to buy the iPhone air because one lens is all you need.

00:59:01 ◼   ► I'm going to prove it to people.

00:59:02 ◼   ► I might join you.

00:59:04 ◼   ► We'll see.

00:59:04 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:59:05 ◼   ► It's only a year.

00:59:06 ◼   ► I can always switch back next time.

00:59:09 ◼   ► It also gets me out of my conundrum of always having bought a black iPhone every year,

00:59:14 ◼   ► which I can't do with the 17 Pro.

00:59:16 ◼   ► Oh, right.

00:59:17 ◼   ► I would have to buy the midnight blue or whatever they call it.

00:59:20 ◼   ► I don't have a rule.

00:59:21 ◼   ► I never signed a contract that says I have to buy a quote unquote black iPhone every year.

00:59:26 ◼   ► And a lot of years they've been space gray.

00:59:29 ◼   ► And a lot of the years the space gray hasn't really been that dark.

00:59:33 ◼   ► It's sort of a very middle of the ground gray.

00:59:37 ◼   ► I don't have a religious obligation to buy a black, quote unquote, black or totally neutral

00:59:43 ◼   ► gray iPhone.

00:59:45 ◼   ► It's just I tend to buy the closest to black that they make, which is the midnight blue

00:59:51 ◼   ► for 17 Pro.

00:59:53 ◼   ► But I could buy an actual black iPhone air.

00:59:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:59:56 ◼   ► All right.

00:59:57 ◼   ► I think we're getting closer here.

00:59:59 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:00:00 ◼   ► Anyway, there's a rumor.

01:00:01 ◼   ► The last thing is there a prediction market for for what phone you buy.

01:00:05 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:00:05 ◼   ► I hope not, because then, you know, then I'll get into trouble like these NBA guys and the

01:00:12 ◼   ► baseball pitchers where all of a sudden people are like, do you see the one with the baseball

01:00:16 ◼   ► pitchers where it was literally down to which pitch they would throw?

01:00:19 ◼   ► And so wild.

01:00:21 ◼   ► He would be the one guy who got arrested.

01:00:23 ◼   ► It was like, yeah, the first pitch I throw will be a splitter in the dirt.

01:00:27 ◼   ► I met a guy last year who spends a lot of time with minor league baseball players.

01:00:32 ◼   ► And he said two things about them.

01:00:34 ◼   ► One is they are really dialed into their nutrition and the diets they eat.

01:00:39 ◼   ► And like, they're really savvy about food.

01:00:43 ◼   ► And two, they're degenerate gamblers.

01:00:46 ◼   ► They are just betting on everything.

01:00:50 ◼   ► I don't know if that's true, but it sounds right.

01:00:52 ◼   ► The one guy who just got arrested for being part, and it was so stupid.

01:00:57 ◼   ► The guy has like a $20 million contract for a couple of years to pitch.

01:01:01 ◼   ► And he made, I don't know, a couple thousand dollars, just thousands.

01:01:06 ◼   ► Amazing.

01:01:07 ◼   ► And might never be able to pitch again because it was obviously, it's crooked.

01:01:13 ◼   ► It wasn't throwing games, but he was throwing pitches.

01:01:15 ◼   ► But it was like, first pitch he throws will be a splitter in the dirt.

01:01:20 ◼   ► So that you could bet on the velocity being low.

01:01:23 ◼   ► Like his fastball was like 98, 99.

01:01:25 ◼   ► And the splitter is like 87, 88.

01:01:27 ◼   ► So you could bet the under, like the over-under on what speed the pitch will be, would always be under.

01:01:33 ◼   ► And you could bet that it would be a ball because it was going to hit the dirt in front of the plate.

01:01:38 ◼   ► And he did it a couple times and people were making money.

01:01:42 ◼   ► The bettors, the pitchers only made a couple thousand dollars apparently.

01:01:45 ◼   ► Some of the bettors made like half a million dollars overall over the time they were betting on this.

01:01:52 ◼   ► But the one time he came into a game, it was against the Dodgers and he threw the splitter in the dirt and the batter swung.

01:01:59 ◼   ► He was so fooled by the pitch that he swung at it anyway.

01:02:02 ◼   ► So it was a strike.

01:02:04 ◼   ► And the FBI had like copies of the text messages where they were like laughing about it.

01:02:09 ◼   ► They weren't mad.

01:02:11 ◼   ► They were like, I can't believe that happened.

01:02:13 ◼   ► Terrible.

01:02:13 ◼   ► So anyway, I don't want to get involved in any kind of FBI investigation into this.

01:02:19 ◼   ► I do think though, I do think, and I don't know what Apple thought with the iPhone.

01:02:26 ◼   ► It brings to mind the iPhone minis, right?

01:02:28 ◼   ► And I know I never bought one.

01:02:31 ◼   ► I wish I had.

01:02:32 ◼   ► I really wish I'd bought the 13 mini because the 13 mini so improved the battery life.

01:02:38 ◼   ► The 12 mini really did have problematic, problematically short battery life.

01:02:42 ◼   ► That is not a problem with the iPhone air.

01:02:45 ◼   ► The battery life is a little obviously less than the 17 pro, but 17 pro really expands the battery life from like the 16 pro.

01:02:53 ◼   ► The iPhone air has battery life comparable to, I don't know, I'm off the top of my head, like a 14 pro.

01:02:59 ◼   ► It's just a couple of years back, the best, not max, but regular size pro iPhone you could buy.

01:03:06 ◼   ► The iPhone air is around that battery life.

01:03:09 ◼   ► It's pretty good.

01:03:10 ◼   ► It's not that hard to top it off a little bit.

01:03:14 ◼   ► You don't have to go back, like I said, you only have to go back like three, four years to when this was the battery life of any iPhone you bought.

01:03:22 ◼   ► It's fine.

01:03:23 ◼   ► It's not as long as if battery life really is your number one issue.

01:03:27 ◼   ► No, obviously the thinnest phone is not the one for you.

01:03:29 ◼   ► But I do wonder, like, obviously the iPhone minis 12 and 13 did not set the world on fire sales wise.

01:03:39 ◼   ► And Apple never made one again.

01:03:41 ◼   ► But I wonder if they expected it to.

01:03:43 ◼   ► And with this, the reports are sales are low, but I kind of feel like they have to be low.

01:03:52 ◼   ► Because I think people forget how typical consumers approach new things.

01:03:58 ◼   ► And this phone is so much thinner when you hold it.

01:04:02 ◼   ► It is so much thinner.

01:04:03 ◼   ► It's obviously different than any iPhone that they've ever made before.

01:04:08 ◼   ► And that's weird to people.

01:04:10 ◼   ► And it costs $1,000 to start.

01:04:12 ◼   ► And people don't buy things for $1,000 that they consider weird.

01:04:16 ◼   ► But that's how the iPhone itself started in 2007.

01:04:21 ◼   ► It wasn't $1,000.

01:04:22 ◼   ► It was like $600 or $700 for most of them.

01:04:26 ◼   ► And people were very intrigued.

01:04:27 ◼   ► And people loved their iPods already.

01:04:30 ◼   ► But it was like normal.

01:04:33 ◼   ► They only sold like a, I don't know, like a million in the first version.

01:04:36 ◼   ► And like $10 million by halfway through.

01:04:41 ◼   ► Like 18 months in.

01:04:42 ◼   ► Steve Jobs' goal was by the end of 2008.

01:04:46 ◼   ► A year and a half after they began selling iPhones to have sold $10 million.

01:04:50 ◼   ► Which would give them 1% of the global smartphone market.

01:04:54 ◼   ► That's how he introduced the original iPhone in 2007.

01:04:57 ◼   ► As a goal.

01:04:58 ◼   ► And they hit that.

01:05:00 ◼   ► They sold, I think, $12 or $13 million by that time.

01:05:03 ◼   ► Which is nothing by today's standards, right?

01:05:06 ◼   ► Yeah, that's like a week's worth of.

01:05:08 ◼   ► Right.

01:05:09 ◼   ► Or days, I guess.

01:05:11 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:05:11 ◼   ► It's ridiculous how many they sell.

01:05:15 ◼   ► Because early adopters are a weird bunch.

01:05:18 ◼   ► And you kind of have to be an early adopter to buy the iPhone Air.

01:05:22 ◼   ► And I don't think there's any possible way that this phone, however good an idea it is.

01:05:28 ◼   ► And however much of a success it might ultimately be.

01:05:31 ◼   ► I think it has to be something Apple sticks with for years before it really becomes a thing.

01:05:38 ◼   ► Which is exactly how the iPhone worked.

01:05:40 ◼   ► And it's how the iPod worked, right?

01:05:41 ◼   ► The iPod didn't set the world on fire when it debuted in 2001.

01:05:45 ◼   ► It took a couple years before people are like, oh, okay, I guess I should buy a $300 MP3 player that pocket-sized and doesn't take CDs or tapes or anything.

01:05:55 ◼   ► That's how early adoption works.

01:05:57 ◼   ► You have to wait a couple years.

01:05:59 ◼   ► It always takes years.

01:06:01 ◼   ► And I don't think there's any scenario where even if the sales, we didn't have these stories about today's first iPhone Air being disappointing, even if it was selling okay, I think it would still be relatively small amount compared to the overall number of iPhones they sell.

01:06:18 ◼   ► But I think there's a chance that five years from now, this is how most people's iPhones look.

01:06:23 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:06:24 ◼   ► It feels to me like this is kind of where the base model iPhone at least would – I don't think they'll ever be able to put as many cameras in this as the Pro kind of necessitates.

01:06:34 ◼   ► But if this is the direction that the base model is going into, this year they probably actually couldn't make enough of these to be the base model and also hit their margin targets and all that sort of stuff.

01:06:47 ◼   ► So – and it is more expensive.

01:06:49 ◼   ► It's hard for me to imagine a future where the base model iPhone does not get thinner and maybe even loses a camera.

01:06:56 ◼   ► Or maybe they figure out how to put two in this level of thickness.

01:07:00 ◼   ► Yeah, well, that's where I'm really curious because the information, Wayne Ma and Queener Liu, Queener Liu, hopefully I'm doing justice to their name.

01:07:10 ◼   ► But Wayne Ma is a really well-sourced Apple reporter at the information and had a story last week that Apple was postponing the second version of the Air.

01:07:21 ◼   ► Originally, it was supposed to come out next September with the iPhone 18 models and the foldable phone that's supposedly coming in next September.

01:07:30 ◼   ► And instead, it's coming later, if at all.

01:07:34 ◼   ► And then hours later, after saying, hey, it's up in the air whether there even is going to be a second-generation Air, they published a second report that said that they are.

01:07:44 ◼   ► It says Apple is – this is from the information.

01:07:45 ◼   ► Apple is delaying the release of a second-generation iPhone Air to work on a redesign of the device and make it more appealing to consumers.

01:07:51 ◼   ► According to two people with knowledge of the matter, the redesign could include a second camera lens and attempt to address one of consumers' main complaints, blah, blah, blah.

01:08:02 ◼   ► And it says, instead, some Apple engineers are hoping to release a redesigned version with a second camera lens in spring 2027 alongside existing plans to release the standard iPhone 18 and 18e at that time.

01:08:17 ◼   ► Because I think that's another thing about next year that supposedly at the September event, there will be no regular iPhone 18.

01:08:25 ◼   ► It will be the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max and the iPhone Fold or whatever they're going to call that one.

01:08:32 ◼   ► And that the regular iPhone 18 won't come until the next spring, like at the same time last spring when they announced the 16e.

01:08:41 ◼   ► And so I guess the 17e is coming this spring and the next spring an 18e and the regular 18 and maybe the new iPhone Air.

01:08:51 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:08:52 ◼   ► But my question, and I'm wondering what you think, is if it – what would the second lens be?

01:08:58 ◼   ► On the regular iPhones, the second lens is an ultra-wide.

01:09:02 ◼   ► But I find the ultra-wide to be way less interesting than the telephoto.

01:09:06 ◼   ► It's the zoom that I occasionally – that's the zoom that makes me think, ah, I shouldn't buy the iPhone Air.

01:09:13 ◼   ► Same.

01:09:13 ◼   ► I would never – I would always choose the zoom over the ultra-wide.

01:09:18 ◼   ► Every picture I take with the ultra-wide is almost unusable, other than the macro stuff, which –

01:09:25 ◼   ► Right.

01:09:26 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:09:26 ◼   ► Maybe software can eventually get somewhere with the macro stuff where it just basically, you know, up samples or whatever that –

01:09:34 ◼   ► However it can imagine a sharper – especially for text and stuff like that, which you're not actually going to really post the photo or anything like that.

01:09:42 ◼   ► You're just kind of – but, yeah, no, I would definitely want a zoom.

01:09:46 ◼   ► And I don't know if it'll be as much of a telephoto because of the whole thickness thing.

01:09:51 ◼   ► But I guess anything's better than nothing.

01:09:53 ◼   ► And the digital cropping only gets you so far.

01:09:57 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:09:58 ◼   ► The other thing, though, about the iPhone Air not having either of the – either telephoto or ultra-wide,

01:10:05 ◼   ► and it is the ultra-wide that does macro mode on the iPhone 17 Pro, and I guess on the 17,

01:10:11 ◼   ► 17, the one camera on the iPhone Air, the main camera, which is the only camera, has a minimum focal distance of 15 centimeters.

01:10:21 ◼   ► But on the Pro models for the last few years, the minimum focal distance has been 20 centimeters.

01:10:27 ◼   ► And I know 5 centimeters doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're getting close to something, like a sheet of paper or something in your hand,

01:10:35 ◼   ► when you're trying to get something close, 5 centimeters actually makes a pretty big difference.

01:10:42 ◼   ► It really kind of is.

01:10:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:10:44 ◼   ► So you'd actually – you actually need or would miss or won't miss not having macro with the iPhone Air a lot more

01:10:56 ◼   ► because the one camera it does have can be 5 centimeters closer to the subject it photographs, which is really nice.

01:11:03 ◼   ► It's actually something that's technically superior about the phone because it has a smaller sensor because everything's thinner about it.

01:11:12 ◼   ► So there's an optical quality tradeoff because the sensor is smaller and the lens is closer to the sensor.

01:11:19 ◼   ► But because the lens is closer to the sensor and the sensor is smaller or something, it can focus 5 – at a physical distance 5 centimeters closer to the subject.

01:11:28 ◼   ► But I kind of hope that for the premium nature of the iPhone Air, that the second lens would be a telephoto, not an ultrawide.

01:11:38 ◼   ► Because I just don't – like you said, especially for still, sometimes for videos, ultrawide's nice because photos – videos are cropped a little.

01:11:47 ◼   ► So the ultrawide doesn't look so fish-eyed, goofy perspective.

01:11:52 ◼   ► But the still photos with the ultrawide, most of them, I think you have to be so talented to get a framing where people don't look comical, like Funhaus mirror style.

01:12:02 ◼   ► It's really hard.

01:12:03 ◼   ► Whereas the telephoto solves such an obvious problem.

01:12:07 ◼   ► I want to get a picture of this thing that is far away and I can't get closer to it.

01:12:14 ◼   ► Either because I don't have time to get closer before the moment passes or there's some logistical reason.

01:12:21 ◼   ► This is my seat in the auditorium.

01:12:23 ◼   ► I can't just get closer to the stage.

01:12:25 ◼   ► Or I'm at the zoo.

01:12:26 ◼   ► Which actually is probably a real world issue for people.

01:12:31 ◼   ► So I think the customer segmentation of this stuff is fascinating.

01:12:35 ◼   ► Obviously, if you are shooting video or photos for any professional purpose, like you will have a pro phone and it may not even be your main phone.

01:12:44 ◼   ► It may just be a work phone of some sort.

01:12:47 ◼   ► But the air, it's definitely, there's a fashion element to it of the thinness and just kind of the different, the way it looks differently.

01:12:56 ◼   ► But it is, it's a tricky segmentation to conceptualize because it's not obvious to me who the buyer is.

01:13:08 ◼   ► But obviously, I think the pricing is, gets overblown because no one actually pays that price.

01:13:15 ◼   ► People are either getting it subsidized or they're paying monthly.

01:13:18 ◼   ► So the all-in $1,000 numbers to me always feel artificial because some people are paying more, some people are paying less.

01:13:27 ◼   ► I don't know, through the upgrade program, I have to do a certain amount of insurance and all this sort of stuff.

01:13:33 ◼   ► So I don't know.

01:13:35 ◼   ► But it is, it's a fascinating segmentation thing.

01:13:37 ◼   ► And I wonder how much they, you got to imagine they put a lot of thought and research into this.

01:13:43 ◼   ► Like the whole trope about Apple not doing market research, that is nonsense.

01:13:47 ◼   ► Like Apple's doing a lot of market research and a lot of testing and a lot of stuff like that.

01:13:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:13:52 ◼   ► What they don't do is, what are those called?

01:13:55 ◼   ► Focus groups.

01:13:56 ◼   ► Focus groups.

01:13:57 ◼   ► They don't do focus groups.

01:13:58 ◼   ► Probably not.

01:13:59 ◼   ► Or if they do, they don't do them the way other companies do, where they come out of the focus group and say,

01:14:05 ◼   ► well, those 12 people said we should make an orange phone, so we're making an orange phone.

01:14:09 ◼   ► That's not how Apple would do it.

01:14:11 ◼   ► But they definitely do market research.

01:14:13 ◼   ► And they definitely study how the things they do sell, sell.

01:14:19 ◼   ► And I mean, the other thing about it is, for as enormous a product, I mean, it's said repeatedly, it's been true,

01:14:27 ◼   ► I think for at least a decade.

01:14:28 ◼   ► Even a decade ago, it was true that the iPhone was the single greatest consumer product any company has ever made.

01:14:35 ◼   ► It has made the company, it has made Apple the number one for most of the last decade.

01:14:41 ◼   ► I know NVIDIA is on top right now, but Apple's like number two or three in market cap.

01:14:47 ◼   ► It's almost entirely driven by the iPhone.

01:14:50 ◼   ► And even the thing like services revenue that Apple puts on their books now, their services revenue is generated from iPhone users, right?

01:14:59 ◼   ► Without the iPhone, the services revenue isn't really there.

01:15:02 ◼   ► It's an enormous hit product.

01:15:06 ◼   ► And they sell extremely few SKUs for it, right?

01:15:11 ◼   ► I mean, people keep talking about with the context of the air that the fourth iPhone just never seems to click, right?

01:15:18 ◼   ► They tried the mini, it didn't really click.

01:15:20 ◼   ► Then they tried for the last few years, the plus on the regular, take the regular phone without the pro and just make a big one, called it plus.

01:15:29 ◼   ► Didn't really, it wasn't a real hit.

01:15:32 ◼   ► Now they're made the air and people are saying it doesn't click, but that's kind of crazy to think that this most successful consumer product ever only comes in three units a year.

01:15:41 ◼   ► I mean, they sell, I mean, look at how many different MacBooks they make, right?

01:15:47 ◼   ► There's two sizes of MacBook Air now, thankfully, right?

01:15:50 ◼   ► For way too long, in my opinion, they didn't make a bigger screened air for the, you had to spend $2,500 to get a MacBook Pro to get a 16 inch or 15 inch display.

01:16:02 ◼   ► They make four MacBook sizes, but within the MacBooks, there's actually a lot more differentiation with the chips and stuff.

01:16:12 ◼   ► So the form factors, there's not a lot of variety, but there's an awful lot of technical variety in terms of the specs you can get inside.

01:16:18 ◼   ► And you end up with this price range from like $999 or actually less than $999 if you count like the discounts that they have for the Airs.

01:16:28 ◼   ► Amazon's had new MacBook Airs, the M4s, for like $750 in recent weeks.

01:16:34 ◼   ► And Walmart sells the old M1 MacBook Air for $599, which is still a great, for $599, it's a great buy.

01:16:43 ◼   ► And you can buy a MacBook Pro with the max chip and all the RAM for $5,000 or $6,000.

01:16:51 ◼   ► It's kind of crazy that the more successful product, the iPhone, doesn't really have that kind of differentiation, right?

01:16:58 ◼   ► Like, why don't they make a $3,000 iPhone?

01:17:00 ◼   ► I mean, that might be what the folding one is, but it's kind of crazy.

01:17:04 ◼   ► No, it's interesting.

01:17:07 ◼   ► I mean, and yeah, you're not, you don't have control over how many GPU cores or whatever it is on a phone the way you could customize that on a Mac.

01:17:16 ◼   ► But yeah, it is interesting.

01:17:18 ◼   ► And maybe it's the, it's basically like, I want a big screen because I'm not putting it in a small pocket, or I want something that fits in a small pocket.

01:17:27 ◼   ► And then there are small phone people, but certainly not the segmentation that the Mac has.

01:17:32 ◼   ► Yeah, it just doesn't make sense to me that they couldn't keep the mini around, even if it only sold one out of 10 phones or one out of 15 iPhones.

01:17:40 ◼   ► Like, why not?

01:17:40 ◼   ► One out of 15 iPhones is still a lot of iPhone minis.

01:17:44 ◼   ► And if the iPhone Air really is only one out of 10 of this generation of iPhones, 10% of this generation of iPhones, most companies would kill to sell that many of a product that costs $1,000.

01:17:57 ◼   ► Like a multi-billion dollar business.

01:17:58 ◼   ► Right.

01:18:00 ◼   ► It's a $1,000 product.

01:18:01 ◼   ► Apple famously has high margins.

01:18:03 ◼   ► Their margins have only gone up in recent years.

01:18:05 ◼   ► So it's a $1,000 product with 30 to 40% profit margins.

01:18:09 ◼   ► And 10% of the new iPhones are this one.

01:18:13 ◼   ► Most companies would kill for that.

01:18:15 ◼   ► Just the whole company, like the iPhone Air by itself is probably a Fortune 500 company, somewhere in the Fortune 500.

01:18:22 ◼   ► It's probably bigger than the entire Pixel phone market.

01:18:26 ◼   ► Oh, without question.

01:18:27 ◼   ► Yeah, probably for like from the history of the Pixel.

01:18:31 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:18:31 ◼   ► All right.

01:18:33 ◼   ► Let me take a break here.

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01:20:53 ◼   ► What else do we got?

01:20:55 ◼   ► iPhone Pocket we talked about.

01:20:57 ◼   ► iPhone Air we talked about.

01:21:00 ◼   ► Oh, how about ChatGPT's personality?

01:21:02 ◼   ► Yeah, that's kind of interesting.

01:21:04 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:21:05 ◼   ► I tried your efficient and I was only getting one word answers and I was like, I don't know if I like that.

01:21:11 ◼   ► You don't like that?

01:21:12 ◼   ► I mean, I do, but sometimes, what I hate, and I agree with you, is the stupid schlocky talk or, and I guess we should explain what happened.

01:21:22 ◼   ► Right.

01:21:23 ◼   ► But basically, there's a new ChatGPT version 5.1 and they've introduced more settings for basically the way it will respond to you.

01:21:34 ◼   ► And I don't have the list in front of me.

01:21:36 ◼   ► There were, and I even asked ChatGPT, I'm like, based on our conversations, which do you recommend I use?

01:21:42 ◼   ► Oh, what did it say?

01:21:44 ◼   ► And it actually recommended, it recommended the efficient one, which is what I had selected in the screenshot I uploaded.

01:21:49 ◼   ► And also, the one that is probably the closest to what I actually want, which is, just tell me what you want to tell me.

01:21:57 ◼   ► And you don't have to pretend you're being nice to me.

01:22:00 ◼   ► You don't have to compliment me.

01:22:02 ◼   ► I hate when it does that one.

01:22:03 ◼   ► It's like, oh, this writing is so, whatever.

01:22:06 ◼   ► It's like, no, tell me what sucks here.

01:22:09 ◼   ► That's why I'm bothering with you here.

01:22:12 ◼   ► You don't have to tell me, you got this, man.

01:22:15 ◼   ► Yeah, you got this, Dan.

01:22:16 ◼   ► That's not what I want.

01:22:20 ◼   ► But it does seem to be something, yeah.

01:22:22 ◼   ► Well, the other thing, though, is that the default personality has gone back to being friendlier, in my opinion, fake friendlier,

01:22:32 ◼   ► which is more like the ChatGPT 4 models, 4.0 and 4.5, that led people, when 5.0 debuted a couple months ago, to complain.

01:22:43 ◼   ► And people literally, I'm not making fun, although kind of making fun, but I'm not exaggerating that there were people saying,

01:22:50 ◼   ► I feel like I lost my best friend.

01:22:51 ◼   ► This sucks.

01:22:53 ◼   ► I feel this was my best friend, and now they're gone.

01:22:58 ◼   ► And the default personality is back to where it used to be, which is more saccharine sugarcoating and whatever.

01:23:07 ◼   ► But they've added more personalities.

01:23:09 ◼   ► And I can tell, just from my having written about it just a couple days ago, and the feedback I've gotten from readers,

01:23:16 ◼   ► that especially people who've been using ChatGPT longer, and longer than me.

01:23:21 ◼   ► I wasn't really a late adopter, but I wasn't early, but a lot of people were earlier.

01:23:25 ◼   ► A lot of people had what I used to have, which is a bunch of custom instructions.

01:23:30 ◼   ► There's a field somewhere in the settings here, custom.

01:23:33 ◼   ► It's actually called custom instructions.

01:23:35 ◼   ► Describe or select traits.

01:23:37 ◼   ► And that's where you can put goofy things in there and say, always call me sir or something like that,

01:23:44 ◼   ► and it'll keep addressing you as sir.

01:23:45 ◼   ► Well, it's interesting, the ones on the Mac app that they suggest that you could put in there.

01:23:50 ◼   ► Chatty, witty, straight shooting, or encouraging.

01:23:53 ◼   ► Yeah, Gen Z, that's one of the things that they suggest putting in there.

01:23:59 ◼   ► How about like Australian accent?

01:24:02 ◼   ► Can we do that?

01:24:03 ◼   ► I mean, you can put anything in there.

01:24:05 ◼   ► You can say, please answer every question in the form of a limerick, and it'll try at least for a while.

01:24:10 ◼   ► Mr. T style.

01:24:12 ◼   ► Right, but I had previously tried to get the more straightforward, just seriously, no, don't pretend to have a personality.

01:24:22 ◼   ► Just give me the answers.

01:24:23 ◼   ► More like a command line.

01:24:25 ◼   ► That's really what I want.

01:24:27 ◼   ► I don't like the phoniness of it, and it's a bunch of wasted words, and I tried to get that.

01:24:33 ◼   ► What drives me nuts is like the whole thing where it asks you if you want it to do like 10 different follow-ups for each thing.

01:24:41 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:24:44 ◼   ► Sorry, I interrupted you.

01:24:46 ◼   ► You're saying you're trying to get it.

01:24:47 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:24:47 ◼   ► Well, but when I discovered with, I think it was with ChatGPT50 where they introduced the personalities and these preset personalities.

01:24:55 ◼   ► And I found the one called robot, and the description was concise and plain or something like that.

01:25:01 ◼   ► And robot was exactly what I wanted, but I still was occasionally getting these things like, and these are just the facts, just like you ask, John.

01:25:10 ◼   ► And it's like, yeah, that's the type of phrase I don't want tacked on.

01:25:13 ◼   ► And I found that when I deleted all my custom instructions saying, just give me the facts or whatever, when I deleted that stuff, the robot personality was more exactly what I wanted than when it was robot plus my instructions that were trying to define that.

01:25:28 ◼   ► And a bunch of readers have said, oh, I just found this.

01:25:32 ◼   ► I didn't know these personalities existed.

01:25:34 ◼   ► I did the same thing, and I love it.

01:25:36 ◼   ► Thank you.

01:25:36 ◼   ► Yeah, that's – I mean, I didn't –

01:25:39 ◼   ► And I've heard from people who think I'm no fun at all.

01:25:43 ◼   ► I try to use the default settings for almost everything just so I feel like I'm experiencing technology the way that, like, most people are experiencing it.

01:25:54 ◼   ► That said, you know, obviously on my Mac I have a million different custom settings going back 30 years.

01:25:58 ◼   ► But I switched to the efficient – and, again, I asked – I found the dialogue here where I'm like, which one of your personality profiles do I match best with?

01:26:09 ◼   ► And it says, based strictly on how you interact, you match efficient more than anything else.

01:26:13 ◼   ► And then I – and it kind of explained it, and I said, okay, cool.

01:26:16 ◼   ► Let's roll with that for now.

01:26:17 ◼   ► Thanks.

01:26:18 ◼   ► And this is what I don't like.

01:26:20 ◼   ► It just said, understood.

01:26:21 ◼   ► You don't like that?

01:26:23 ◼   ► One word answers, absolutely.

01:26:25 ◼   ► For a lot of things I do, but I don't know, sometimes I want a little more from it, like a little more verbosity in explaining perhaps something.

01:26:33 ◼   ► But you're right.

01:26:34 ◼   ► What would be worse is just, like, stupid stuff.

01:26:38 ◼   ► And I suppose – did you ever try the voice mode where you're talking to it?

01:26:42 ◼   ► Yeah, I do.

01:26:43 ◼   ► But I find that it's slow enough that I – even on the phone, at least, that I – it's not worth it.

01:26:51 ◼   ► Totally.

01:26:52 ◼   ► I only use it when I point the camera at something and try to get an explanation of what it is in sort of real time.

01:26:59 ◼   ► There was, like, a giant spider outside of our house, and I kind of popped that voice mode on with my son next to me,

01:27:06 ◼   ► and we kind of asked ChatGPT a bunch of questions about this spider, and it – there's a – I don't want to call it a stupidity,

01:27:15 ◼   ► but there's a level of airheadedness to that mode that I just don't – I don't like that.

01:27:22 ◼   ► I don't want that.

01:27:23 ◼   ► But I could also see a lot of people loving that, the way that people just want to chat with anyone.

01:27:28 ◼   ► And so I guess it's good that they give options.

01:27:31 ◼   ► Like, certainly that's better than forcing the same thing on everyone.

01:27:35 ◼   ► I think this is going to be the kind of thing where, you know, already a giant percentage of humans on Earth are using ChatGPT on a monthly basis.

01:27:43 ◼   ► So this is something that people are going to be using a lot, and you should have some control over how you communicate with it,

01:27:51 ◼   ► the way that you would self-select who you're friends with or things like that,

01:27:55 ◼   ► or who you're in a relationship with based on how they talk.

01:27:59 ◼   ► Yeah, and if somebody out there really does enjoy the chattier, fake, friendly, affirming to you, telling you how smart you are style,

01:28:08 ◼   ► or likes the – what's the one called?

01:28:10 ◼   ► Cynical that is supposedly cynical and sarcastic.

01:28:16 ◼   ► It's funny because my previous episode of the show is with Carrot Weather's creator, Brian Mueller,

01:28:21 ◼   ► and I feel like cynical in ChatGPT is trying to be Carrot Weather,

01:28:28 ◼   ► which will – except it isn't actually funny at all, or actual sarcasm.

01:28:35 ◼   ► It's like when people who don't get sarcasm, they make very bad guesses as to what's actually sarcastic,

01:28:40 ◼   ► and I feel like that's the ChatGPT.

01:28:43 ◼   ► And somebody pointed me to Reddit where, like, in the home automation subreddit,

01:28:49 ◼   ► there's people who just love it.

01:28:51 ◼   ► They're like, holy crap, I found this cynical style for ChatGPT,

01:28:55 ◼   ► and now it's like I told it, and they're like, I told it to turn off –

01:28:59 ◼   ► they have the connector to, like, their smart lights through ChatGPT,

01:29:03 ◼   ► and it's like, I told ChatGPT to turn off my lights, and look how it responded.

01:29:06 ◼   ► It's like, okay, dummy, I turned off your lights.

01:29:09 ◼   ► And it's like, I love it.

01:29:10 ◼   ► And it's like, well, who wants that?

01:29:12 ◼   ► I don't want that.

01:29:13 ◼   ► I made a couple of Facebook groups for old Volvo wagons

01:29:17 ◼   ► that have a lot of British guys in them,

01:29:19 ◼   ► and I could see them really enjoying that too.

01:29:21 ◼   ► I don't get it.

01:29:24 ◼   ► I really don't.

01:29:25 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:29:26 ◼   ► But no, I think it's going to be the kind of thing where I think it gets more customized over time.

01:29:32 ◼   ► I don't know if you saw – I linked to this thing called the Sandbar, I think is what it's called,

01:29:37 ◼   ► or maybe that's the name of the company.

01:29:38 ◼   ► I saw that in the show notes, but I don't –

01:29:40 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:29:41 ◼   ► I didn't see it before.

01:29:42 ◼   ► It's a startup.

01:29:44 ◼   ► It's, I think, ex-meta people, and I got a demo.

01:29:48 ◼   ► A bunch of tech writers got demos in the last few weeks,

01:29:52 ◼   ► and it's kind of interesting.

01:29:54 ◼   ► It's a ring that you wear that has a touch-sensitive little pad on it,

01:30:00 ◼   ► so you can do – they describe it as like a mouse pointer for your phone almost.

01:30:05 ◼   ► I find that to be less interesting, but basically it has a microphone on it,

01:30:11 ◼   ► and enough of a chip on it that it's doing some of the voice-to-text logic on the actual ring,

01:30:18 ◼   ► so it's just faster than if the audio is going through the air.

01:30:23 ◼   ► And they've built this software where the LLM responds to you in your voice,

01:30:28 ◼   ► so you kind of do a training script, and then it just talks back to you as you,

01:30:34 ◼   ► which took me about 30 seconds to get used to,

01:30:38 ◼   ► but I actually prefer it because you're not trying to pretend that there's some other voice in your head.

01:30:44 ◼   ► It's not Siri responding to you in some weird voice.

01:30:48 ◼   ► It's basically your inner monologue talking back to you with the internet,

01:30:52 ◼   ► and it's kind of interesting.

01:30:54 ◼   ► I only got a short demo, and I would like to try it for a longer period.

01:31:01 ◼   ► To me, it's going to be really hard to kind of disintermediate the built-in OS Siri or whatever

01:31:09 ◼   ► if Siri ever gets it together,

01:31:11 ◼   ► but at least there's some interesting stuff that's being thought of right now,

01:31:17 ◼   ► and I love this kind of indie hardware startup boom

01:31:20 ◼   ► where you don't have to have a billion dollars to do a hardware startup these days.

01:31:25 ◼   ► So that's one thing.

01:31:27 ◼   ► I never tried the humane pin.

01:31:29 ◼   ► That felt to me kind of DOA,

01:31:31 ◼   ► but stuff like this is more interesting,

01:31:34 ◼   ► and I don't know.

01:31:35 ◼   ► All this stuff feels so niche,

01:31:38 ◼   ► but it also is not implausible to think that we're going into a future

01:31:43 ◼   ► where people are kind of talking to an AI assistant a lot of the time during the day.

01:31:51 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:31:53 ◼   ► I remember years ago, it was obviously more than 10 years ago

01:31:57 ◼   ► because it was before the Apple Watch,

01:31:59 ◼   ► but I guess it was when it was rumored that Apple was working on one,

01:32:02 ◼   ► and at one point, Tim Cook said,

01:32:03 ◼   ► the wrist is an interesting place, something like that.

01:32:06 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:32:07 ◼   ► I think the finger is an interesting place.

01:32:09 ◼   ► I've never bought like an Oura ring

01:32:11 ◼   ► because I already have an Apple Watch if I want to track my fitness,

01:32:14 ◼   ► but I'd consider it if I was more into fitness tracking

01:32:20 ◼   ► because I think they look fine, right?

01:32:22 ◼   ► And I would consider wearing a wedding ring,

01:32:25 ◼   ► and I would consider wearing a ring on my other hand

01:32:28 ◼   ► or put another ring on my...

01:32:30 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:32:31 ◼   ► I would consider it.

01:32:32 ◼   ► I do think the finger is an interesting place.

01:32:35 ◼   ► I don't know how else to say it.

01:32:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:32:39 ◼   ► Does the sandbar...

01:32:41 ◼   ► It sounds too good to be true, though.

01:32:44 ◼   ► Like the thing that doesn't sound too good to be true

01:32:46 ◼   ► is that the Oura doesn't have a microphone or cameras, obviously,

01:32:49 ◼   ► or a speaker,

01:32:51 ◼   ► so it makes sense to me that the battery lasts,

01:32:54 ◼   ► but with the microphone,

01:32:55 ◼   ► and if it speaks to you in your voice,

01:32:58 ◼   ► it just doesn't seem possible that the battery could last.

01:33:01 ◼   ► The speaking, all that stuff's happening through headphones

01:33:03 ◼   ► or your phone speaker, so that...

01:33:05 ◼   ► Yeah, but totally.

01:33:06 ◼   ► Yeah, but it still is driving.

01:33:09 ◼   ► Even if the speaker isn't on the ring,

01:33:11 ◼   ► it's driving a Bluetooth connection.

01:33:13 ◼   ► Yeah, and much more data is going over that stream.

01:33:18 ◼   ► And then the Oura, I think, syncs like once or twice a day.

01:33:21 ◼   ► I don't think it's...

01:33:22 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:33:22 ◼   ► You kind of have to manually sync it.

01:33:24 ◼   ► And that, yeah, the battery life has improved on that.

01:33:27 ◼   ► I just got a new one for testing,

01:33:29 ◼   ► and the battery, I've never not...

01:33:34 ◼   ► I've never even come close to running out of battery.

01:33:35 ◼   ► I'm only wearing it when I'm sleeping, mostly,

01:33:38 ◼   ► which now they want you to wear it all day,

01:33:40 ◼   ► but it's...

01:33:41 ◼   ► I don't need to do that.

01:33:42 ◼   ► But it's an interesting form factor, right?

01:33:44 ◼   ► It's an interesting place on your body

01:33:46 ◼   ► where most people have some free fingers, right?

01:33:49 ◼   ► I mean...

01:33:50 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:33:50 ◼   ► There is, like, the kind of jewelry element.

01:33:54 ◼   ► I think a lot of these things try to look too much like jewelry,

01:33:57 ◼   ► but they're made by computer engineers,

01:34:00 ◼   ► so they look terrible.

01:34:01 ◼   ► Right.

01:34:01 ◼   ► I actually think the newest Auras that are ceramic

01:34:06 ◼   ► and look a little like the old ceramic Apple Watch,

01:34:09 ◼   ► I think these are the nicest-looking ones so far.

01:34:12 ◼   ► But it is interesting.

01:34:13 ◼   ► Is it the new meta sunglasses have a ring component?

01:34:19 ◼   ► What's the one that...

01:34:20 ◼   ► Don't one of those things have a ring that you're supposed to use

01:34:23 ◼   ► No, it has a wristband, right?

01:34:25 ◼   ► Yeah, it's a wristband.

01:34:26 ◼   ► That I'm a lot less interested in.

01:34:28 ◼   ► Yeah, because then you've got a bracelet on your other wrist.

01:34:31 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:34:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:34:32 ◼   ► It's like I wouldn't rule out a wristband,

01:34:34 ◼   ► but it's like I don't want to wear a wristband.

01:34:36 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:34:37 ◼   ► All this feels like stuff, though, that it's like,

01:34:40 ◼   ► oh, well, Apple's going to do this.

01:34:41 ◼   ► And I don't know if they are.

01:34:42 ◼   ► I don't know if there's enough to a ring

01:34:45 ◼   ► that they would think that tens or hundreds of millions

01:34:48 ◼   ► of people are going to want.

01:34:49 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't think so either.

01:34:50 ◼   ► Even though they're like, it's a pretty niche product.

01:34:53 ◼   ► Yeah, and as much as, okay,

01:34:56 ◼   ► Apple obviously has a wide variety of screens you can look at, right?

01:34:59 ◼   ► The phone, the iPad, the Mac.

01:35:00 ◼   ► Even Apple TV is somehow powering the screen.

01:35:03 ◼   ► But screens are different.

01:35:05 ◼   ► I feel like they've put all their eggs in.

01:35:07 ◼   ► If they're going to do a fitness tracker, it's the Apple Watch.

01:35:09 ◼   ► And I feel like having another fitness device, it just isn't.

01:35:14 ◼   ► I don't see the purpose.

01:35:15 ◼   ► If they're already making Apple Watches,

01:35:18 ◼   ► I don't see the point of Apple making a ring.

01:35:20 ◼   ► Even though the ring is an interesting place on the body,

01:35:23 ◼   ► I feel like what would be the point if you have an Apple Watch?

01:35:28 ◼   ► Totally, which I don't see them saying,

01:35:30 ◼   ► oh, if you don't want an Apple Watch, why don't you buy our ring?

01:35:33 ◼   ► Because I feel like the ring would probably cost about as much as an Apple Watch.

01:35:36 ◼   ► And doesn't get them nearly as much of the stuff that you can do with the watch.

01:35:44 ◼   ► So that doesn't make sense.

01:35:46 ◼   ► Right, whereas the future of making glasses, which is a whole other topic,

01:35:50 ◼   ► but glasses opens up new opportunities, right?

01:35:53 ◼   ► You could put a camera there and you look at them.

01:35:56 ◼   ► It's visual.

01:35:56 ◼   ► It's a totally new frontier that a ring wouldn't add to Apple.

01:36:01 ◼   ► But I can totally see why other companies are making rings.

01:36:04 ◼   ► I would much rather be Aura making rings than be Fitbit making watches going against Apple.

01:36:13 ◼   ► Yeah, totally.

01:36:14 ◼   ► While we're talking about AI,

01:36:16 ◼   ► the other news new to this episode of the podcast would be the rumor from Gurman

01:36:22 ◼   ► that Apple is going with a Google Gemini model,

01:36:25 ◼   ► but it'll be white labeled and not advertised as being provided by

01:36:30 ◼   ► or based on Google technology for Apple intelligence next year.

01:36:36 ◼   ► And it doesn't seem, it's only Gurman who's reporting it,

01:36:40 ◼   ► but so much stuff is only ever reported by Mark Gurman.

01:36:44 ◼   ► So I don't, I don't, I wouldn't bet against it.

01:36:46 ◼   ► I think it's totally plausible and kind of Google needs partners.

01:36:49 ◼   ► So they might be willing to give Apple a deal that others wouldn't.

01:36:53 ◼   ► It's so interesting.

01:36:56 ◼   ► And it's for a billion dollars a year,

01:36:58 ◼   ► which it's like for me or you or normal people,

01:37:01 ◼   ► it's, I don't know, you say anything.

01:37:02 ◼   ► It's like the old Dr.

01:37:03 ◼   ► Evil joke from Austin Powers where it,

01:37:06 ◼   ► except the new, the new laugh at a billion.

01:37:09 ◼   ► It back then it was like $1 million and everybody at the table,

01:37:13 ◼   ► because Dr.

01:37:13 ◼   ► Evil has been frozen for 30 years.

01:37:15 ◼   ► Doesn't realize a million dollars is that much anymore.

01:37:18 ◼   ► Raises the ransom to $1 billion.

01:37:21 ◼   ► And everybody's like, that's a good,

01:37:23 ◼   ► that's a good amount of money to hold the world hostage to.

01:37:26 ◼   ► Now, when they say Apple is licensing Gemini to put into private cloud,

01:37:31 ◼   ► Apple's own private cloud compute servers for $1 billion a year.

01:37:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:37:38 ◼   ► It's that sort of a joke, right?

01:37:40 ◼   ► For at least for Apple and Google, right?

01:37:42 ◼   ► And just specifically between the two companies,

01:37:45 ◼   ► Google is paying Apple at least $20 billion a year in traffic referral fees for Safari with web search.

01:37:54 ◼   ► And it's probably more than that now.

01:37:56 ◼   ► That's just like the number that came out from a court case from like 2018 or 19.

01:38:01 ◼   ► It's probably closer to like $30 billion at this point.

01:38:04 ◼   ► So the deal could really just be, how about instead of giving us $25 billion next year,

01:38:09 ◼   ► you just give us $24 billion and let us have a version of Gemini to run a private cloud compute.

01:38:14 ◼   ► And Google was like, sure.

01:38:15 ◼   ► Totally.

01:38:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:38:17 ◼   ► It's a dollar a user.

01:38:19 ◼   ► It's a rounding error.

01:38:20 ◼   ► I guess that my question to you is like, how capable do you think Siri needs to be?

01:38:26 ◼   ► I don't think Apple or anyone expects it to be on the level of ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini.

01:38:33 ◼   ► It can do virtually everything that you ask it to do.

01:38:38 ◼   ► But do you think that it needs to get close to that?

01:38:40 ◼   ► No, I don't.

01:38:42 ◼   ► And I don't think it needs to be a chatbot.

01:38:45 ◼   ► In the same way, I always go back, I guess it's just my personal route of having spent the first part of my career doing graphic design and desktop publishing,

01:38:54 ◼   ► that the Mac was the platform for desktop publishing and graphic design and design of anything.

01:39:02 ◼   ► Even when Adobe brought Illustrator and Photoshop to Windows, everybody who was serious about it used a Mac.

01:39:09 ◼   ► And the Mac was where the laser writer was the first consumer laser printer.

01:39:15 ◼   ► And Apple got out of that business of the laser printer business pretty early.

01:39:20 ◼   ► It wasn't that many years.

01:39:21 ◼   ► And eventually, the Mac was the platform for publishing and design.

01:39:26 ◼   ► And Apple didn't make any of the software or any of the printers or anything.

01:39:30 ◼   ► They just sold the computers.

01:39:31 ◼   ► And I feel like and that was a good place to be because graphic designers wanted really powerful Macs to do the make Photoshop and Illustrator go faster.

01:39:40 ◼   ► And they wanted really fancy graphic cards so they could have millions of colors on the biggest display possible.

01:39:46 ◼   ► It's a good business to be in to have an industry built atop of it.

01:39:50 ◼   ► And where do people use the chatbots today?

01:39:53 ◼   ► They use them on their iPhones.

01:39:54 ◼   ► I don't think it's a bad place to be for Apple to just have ChatGPT and Gemini and all these things.

01:40:02 ◼   ► If you look at the top App Store apps, at one point last week, it was like one, two, and three were chat overall, not just in a productivity category.

01:40:11 ◼   ► It was like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Grok.

01:40:14 ◼   ► And it's like they're all for the iPhone.

01:40:16 ◼   ► Yeah, and Sora was up there.

01:40:17 ◼   ► I think that's a fine place to be.

01:40:20 ◼   ► I think Siri just needs, when you ask the type of questions you want to ask now, sports scores, the weather, something about your calendar, what do I have going on tomorrow?

01:40:31 ◼   ► Just be able to answer.

01:40:33 ◼   ► It's just table stakes.

01:40:34 ◼   ► And Siri really can't do shit like that now.

01:40:37 ◼   ► And it really seems frustrating.

01:40:39 ◼   ► And that's so little compared to what people do with ChatGPT.

01:40:43 ◼   ► And again, whether it's healthy or unhealthy that people have these friendships or personal relationships with their chatbot or plan their whole dissertation through the use of it and have transcripts and a history they can search.

01:40:55 ◼   ► You don't need any of that with Siri.

01:40:57 ◼   ► You already have it.

01:40:58 ◼   ► If you want that, use the chatbot.

01:40:59 ◼   ► But if you just say, you know, who won the Thursday night football game last night, you want an answer, you want it to be correct, and you want it now.

01:41:08 ◼   ► And if that's all Siri can do.

01:41:11 ◼   ► But then I think there are features they need to get to with the next generation Apple intelligence where you need to be able to do things like if you're using numbers as your spreadsheet to just tell your computer you want to resort the table by the year instead of by the amount of dollars or something like that.

01:41:29 ◼   ► And it should be able to just work.

01:41:32 ◼   ► You should be able to say, this is what I want to do with this table, and then have it work.

01:41:37 ◼   ► So the things that they've talked about with AppIntense, I think it's exactly the stuff they need to do.

01:41:43 ◼   ► And it's very different from what people use chatbots for.

01:41:46 ◼   ► But it needs to work.

01:41:48 ◼   ► I think you're totally right.

01:41:50 ◼   ► I think the long-term strategic vulnerability is if something like ChatGPT becomes the OS, right?

01:41:58 ◼   ► If that's the platform that you're using to launch apps or to do everything else, and then there is either a device or whatever it is that makes it that you're not using the iPhone as your primary device or that it is interchangeable with something else in a way that reduces your reliance on Apple's platform.

01:42:21 ◼   ► But I don't see that happening anytime soon.

01:42:23 ◼   ► Like, I don't have ChatGPT plugged into any other apps.

01:42:27 ◼   ► I don't think anyone uses those features.

01:42:29 ◼   ► They exist, but I don't see that.

01:42:30 ◼   ► I do let the – on the Mac, I let it do the thing where it will connect to, like, a bbEdit window, like when I'm using it to help me program a script or something.

01:42:38 ◼   ► It's really good.

01:42:39 ◼   ► That's cool.

01:42:40 ◼   ► It just connects.

01:42:40 ◼   ► It just connects.

01:42:41 ◼   ► And it even just asks, like, you give it the permission, and it knows when you switch from bbEdit to ChatGPT, it'll be like, do you want to connect to this bbEdit window, yes or no?

01:42:51 ◼   ► And you say yes.

01:42:52 ◼   ► And then you can just say, now, how do I make this script do blank?

01:42:56 ◼   ► And it can help you.

01:42:57 ◼   ► That's cool.

01:42:57 ◼   ► I should try that.

01:42:59 ◼   ► Yeah, but I love that it's in my control.

01:43:01 ◼   ► And maybe it's because I'm old-fashioned and because I'm old that I kind of want to be the one doing the driving of steering this.

01:43:09 ◼   ► I don't just want to give it a complex description and walk away and have it do stuff.

01:43:16 ◼   ► But I don't think Apple's in a bad spot on this, and I kind of feel like getting this for a billion dollars a year, which really is like laughing at Dr. Evil, low amount of money,

01:43:26 ◼   ► when everybody is saying that Google has spent like $100 billion to get here in the last few years, and Apple can just license it for a billion dollars a year?

01:43:37 ◼   ► I mean, it's like getting it for free.

01:43:39 ◼   ► I mean, it kind of looks really smart that all these other companies have done all this capital outlay of tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars,

01:43:48 ◼   ► and then Apple can license either the best or close, close enough that it's like on the metal stand.

01:43:55 ◼   ► Maybe Anthropic really is gold, metal, and Gemini is silver or bronze or something.

01:44:01 ◼   ► But it's on the metal stand, best-of-breed technology for a billion dollars a year.

01:44:08 ◼   ► That's effectively free.

01:44:09 ◼   ► It looks pretty smart to me.

01:44:10 ◼   ► I agree.

01:44:12 ◼   ► But it hasn't shipped.

01:44:13 ◼   ► It hasn't shipped, and especially they don't have to make every use of it an ad for Gemini that encourages people to download the app or something like that,

01:44:21 ◼   ► which I don't think Apple would do.

01:44:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:44:24 ◼   ► The other thing, though, that I have to mention, it's given all of the German strang.

01:44:30 ◼   ► I know I'm butchering the German, but all of the drama surrounding the delayed Siri Apple intelligence thing from last March,

01:44:38 ◼   ► and my piece on something's rotten in the state of Cupertino, and that, oh, we weren't lying or we weren't exaggerating or wasn't vaporware when we announced it in WWDC 2024.

01:44:50 ◼   ► But if it was real in June of 2024 that the next-generation Siri was going to be able to do these things and the demos that they showed weren't simulated rather than real,

01:45:03 ◼   ► how close could they have been when the answer, according to Mark Gurman, is a licensing deal that they still haven't signed with Google at the end of 2025

01:45:13 ◼   ► to license an entire model from Google to run in private cloud compute.

01:45:19 ◼   ► I kind of feel like what I wrote holds up that what they announced didn't exist or didn't exist in a...

01:45:28 ◼   ► I never said that it didn't exist at all, but I don't think it ever existed with a clear path to,

01:45:33 ◼   ► oh, we can tell this is going to be ready at the time we're saying it's going to be ready,

01:45:38 ◼   ► and it's going to do the things we're going to say it's going to do.

01:45:42 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:45:42 ◼   ► I don't think they're in a bad place here, but I don't think they were where they claimed to be in June of 2024.

01:45:48 ◼   ► No, I think they're actually in a fine place, to your point.

01:45:51 ◼   ► People are using their products and services to use these tools, so that's still where you want to be.

01:45:59 ◼   ► All right.

01:46:00 ◼   ► One more sponsor and one last bonus topic, but the last sponsor, our good friends at Squarespace.

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01:47:43 ◼   ► All right, bonus topic, Mac hardware.

01:47:45 ◼   ► I wrote that the last five years, Apple Silicon came out five years ago in November 2020.

01:47:51 ◼   ► Have been the best five years of Mac hardware ever.

01:47:54 ◼   ► Agree or disagree?

01:47:55 ◼   ► I mean, agree.

01:47:58 ◼   ► Like, my daily driver is a Mac mini that is small enough to fit in a jacket pocket.

01:48:07 ◼   ► And then I have a MacBook Air that I can take everywhere and not feel like I'm carrying a computer.

01:48:14 ◼   ► Like, it's incredible.

01:48:15 ◼   ► And those are not even the high-end products.

01:48:17 ◼   ► As I mentioned earlier, I would love an absurdly thin notebook that is like the iPad Pro as a Mac.

01:48:27 ◼   ► But I'm sure that I'm sure they've thought about that, too.

01:48:32 ◼   ► But they haven't made it for some reason.

01:48:33 ◼   ► I wonder, right, like, why haven't they?

01:48:37 ◼   ► Why did they try the MacBook One, the MacBook Adorable, whatever you want to call it, with Intel, which was underpowered for the purpose?

01:48:44 ◼   ► But now that they have chips that can do it, they haven't tried it.

01:48:48 ◼   ► The crazy small light, almost as light as an iPad for the entire MacBook, including the keyboard.

01:48:57 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think the argument that the iPad is that platform for that user is just that doesn't hold up.

01:49:03 ◼   ► Because it's not.

01:49:04 ◼   ► And it never will be.

01:49:05 ◼   ► And I don't care.

01:49:06 ◼   ► I love my iPad.

01:49:07 ◼   ► But I'm not going to use it for that kind of stuff, the way I use it on my Mac.

01:49:10 ◼   ► Right.

01:49:11 ◼   ► And I kind of feel like nobody's talking about Apple losing, you know, they're going to stop making the Mac soon.

01:49:17 ◼   ► They just want everybody to buy an iPad.

01:49:18 ◼   ► Nobody's saying that anymore.

01:49:19 ◼   ► That's one of the benefits of Apple Silicon.

01:49:22 ◼   ► Like, its Mac sales are stronger than they've ever been.

01:49:26 ◼   ► It's not just me saying hardware is better.

01:49:27 ◼   ► The platform is more popular than ever.

01:49:29 ◼   ► But I also feel that Apple has sort of stopped iPad-ifying Mac OS.

01:49:37 ◼   ► There's things that are frustrating, security-related or privacy-related, things that generate prompts for permission that I think are a little overzealous.

01:49:48 ◼   ► But for the most part, I'm not annoyed even when I'm running the latest Mac OS.

01:49:51 ◼   ► It still gives you the power to shoot yourself in the foot in a way that the iPad doesn't, which also enables you to do things and install things that do things that an iPad is never going to let you do.

01:50:03 ◼   ► But there's that form factor.

01:50:05 ◼   ► I feel like when people say that, oh, if that's what you want, just buy the iPad, it's like you're missing out on the point that, no, no, I know I really want a Mac because I want to do Mac things.

01:50:14 ◼   ► And they don't really make that.

01:50:16 ◼   ► You're the one who says the Mac is a place, right?

01:50:18 ◼   ► Right.

01:50:19 ◼   ► Yeah, it's a place where my mind goes.

01:50:21 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

01:50:23 ◼   ► It's an extension of my brain the way that an iPad just never will be.

01:50:27 ◼   ► And that's fine.

01:50:28 ◼   ► Again, love my iPad.

01:50:29 ◼   ► Super fun for watching YouTube and cooking recipes and that kind of stuff.

01:50:35 ◼   ► And it's a way overpowered tool for that.

01:50:37 ◼   ► But I would pay a lot of money for a Mac that uses the same industrial design level of fitness as that iPad Pro.

01:50:47 ◼   ► And there are the rumors, again, speaking of Matt Gurman, although he's not the exclusive rumor source for this, but that Apple, a bunch of other people, there's so much smoke.

01:50:57 ◼   ► There's clearly a fire that Apple's going to build a new lower cost laptop based on the A18 chip, like a phone chip instead of an M series chip, which presumably will take the place of that $600 Walmart M1 that's literally five years old at this point.

01:51:14 ◼   ► As credible a computer as it still is, an A18 based $600 MacBook would be faster than that M1 MacBook Air.

01:51:23 ◼   ► And things like the screen technology and the form factor, five years is still a long time.

01:51:29 ◼   ► However well Apple Silicon ages, five years is a long time.

01:51:32 ◼   ► But I don't think whatever speculation we can make about what that low-end, low-priced, lower-than-ever-priced MacBook is going to cost,

01:51:41 ◼   ► I don't think it's going to come with a super impressive, super small form factor because that super impressive, super thin form factors are premium.

01:51:52 ◼   ► Look at the iPhone Air phone, right?

01:51:54 ◼   ► It's not a cheap phone.

01:51:56 ◼   ► It's a $1,000 phone.

01:51:57 ◼   ► Totally.

01:51:58 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:51:59 ◼   ► Like that increases market share, which is great.

01:52:01 ◼   ► And Apple should continue to do that.

01:52:03 ◼   ► But what I'm looking for is the sports car, I guess.

01:52:06 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

01:52:07 ◼   ► Like the Roadster, right?

01:52:09 ◼   ► The two-seater convertible Roadster that's just super thin and your ass is low to the ground and it goes like hell.

01:52:16 ◼   ► And I think an Apple Silicon, like that can still be an astonishingly good computer.

01:52:20 ◼   ► Yeah, absolutely.

01:52:21 ◼   ► Which the Intel one was so slow I literally had to basically throw it out.

01:52:25 ◼   ► Like it could not handle Chrome.

01:52:26 ◼   ► But now Apple Silicon can totally handle anything.

01:52:29 ◼   ► Yeah, absolutely.

01:52:30 ◼   ► It would be kind of crazy if that's what the A18 model is, right?

01:52:36 ◼   ► If it's not a $600 laptop, but I don't think, I think the rumors say it's supposed to be low price.

01:52:42 ◼   ► Right.

01:52:42 ◼   ► I think it would be just an M5 chip if it was supposed to be.

01:52:46 ◼   ► Because I think all the new M stuff is probably more space efficient and power efficient.

01:52:52 ◼   ► Right.

01:52:53 ◼   ► But I would love to see them try that.

01:52:55 ◼   ► And again, it would be weird to think that they have more MacBook models than iPhone models, given how many more iPhones, how much more money and how many more people use them.

01:53:05 ◼   ► But it seems like that's where they're headed.

01:53:07 ◼   ► And me and you are asking them to make one more.

01:53:10 ◼   ► But I also would like them to make one or two more iPhones, too.

01:53:13 ◼   ► Yeah, and a Mac Pro and all that stuff.

01:53:17 ◼   ► All right.

01:53:18 ◼   ► I think that's a wrap.

01:53:20 ◼   ► Dan, it was good to have you back on the show.

01:53:21 ◼   ► I promise you it will not be five years before you're back again.

01:53:24 ◼   ► I will wait forever.

01:53:26 ◼   ► But yeah, thanks so much for having me.

01:53:27 ◼   ► What a treat.

01:53:28 ◼   ► All right.

01:53:29 ◼   ► TheNewConsumer.com is the website.

01:53:32 ◼   ► NewConsumer.com.

01:53:34 ◼   ► You said The New Consumer before.

01:53:36 ◼   ► Maybe you just said that.

01:53:37 ◼   ► Well, that's the title.

01:53:37 ◼   ► But yeah, no.

01:53:38 ◼   ► It's just NewConsumer.com.

01:53:39 ◼   ► All right.

01:53:40 ◼   ► But just Google New Consumer and it'll go there.

01:53:43 ◼   ► All right.

01:53:44 ◼   ► Glad you corrected me.

01:53:45 ◼   ► NewConsumer.com.

01:53:46 ◼   ► Dan Fromer, thanks for being here.

01:53:48 ◼   ► Thank you to our sponsors in reverse order Squarespace, where you can get a website, Factor, where you can get meals, and Notion, where you can get an AI agent notes app that you can share with your team.